Talk:Germanic peoples

Unusued references in bibliography

Placing here for consideration, discussion etc.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 12:30, 17 February 2020 (UTC)

Unused references

• Aubin, Hermann [in German]. "History of Europe: The Germans and Huns". Retrieved 12 July 2018. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |encyclopedia= ignored (help)
• Auerbach, Loren; Simpson, Jacqueline (1997). "The Germanic Peoples". Sagas of the Norsemen: Viking and German Myth. Time-Life Books. pp. 8–11. ISBN 9780705435338.
• Barber, Charles; Beal, Joan; Shaw, Philip (2012). "The Germanic languages". The English Language (2 ed.). Cambridge University Press. pp. 85–105. ISBN 9781107394728.
• Bauer, Susan Wise (2010). The History of the Medieval World: From the Conversion of Constantine to the First Crusade. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN 978-0-393-05975-5. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Beckwith, Christopher I. (2009). Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the Present. Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0691135892.
• Bloemers, J.H.F.; van Dorp, T. (1991). Pre- en Protohistorie van de Lage Landen (in Dutch). Heerlen: De Haan / Open Universiteit. ISBN 978-90-269-4448-2. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Bogucki, Peter; Crabtree, Pam J. (2003). Ancient Europe 8000 B.C to A.D. 1000. Encyclopedia of the Barbarian World. Vol. Vol. 2. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. ISBN 0-684-80670-3. {{cite book}}: |volume= has extra text (help)
• Bradshaw, Michael J.; White, George W.; Dymond, Joseph P.; Chacko, Elizabeth (2007). Contemporary World Regional Geography: Global Connections, Local Voices (2 ed.). McGraw-Hill Higher Education. ISBN 978-0072826838.
• Brown, Peter (2012). Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350–550 AD. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0-691-16177-8. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Buccini, Anthony F.; Moulton, William G. [in German]. "Germanic languages: The Emergence of Germanic Languages". Encyclopædia Britannica Online. Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
• Burns, Thomas (1994). Barbarians within the Gates of Rome: A Study of Roman Military Policy and the Barbarians, CA. 375–425 A.D. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. ISBN 978-0-253-31288-4.
• Chadwick, Hector Munro (1911). "Teutonic Peoples". Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 26 (11 ed.). pp. 679–686. Retrieved 4 February 2020.
• Chrysos, Evangelos (2003). "The Empire, the Gentes and the Regna". In Hans-Werner Goetz; Jorg Jarnut; Walter Pohl (eds.). Regna and Gentes: The Relationship between Late Antique and Early Medieval Peoples and Kingdoms in the Transformation of the Roman World. Leiden, NLD: Brill Academic Publishers. ISBN 90-04-12524-8. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Collins, Roger (1999). Early Medieval Europe, 300–1000. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 978-0-333-65808-6. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Dalby, Andrew (1999). Dictionary of Languages. New York: Columbia University Press. ISBN 978-0-231-11568-1.
• Davies, Norman (1998). Europe: A History. New York: Harper Perennial. ISBN 978-0-06-097468-8. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Denniston, John Dewar (1962). Appian's Roman History. Harvard University Press.
• Detwiler, Donald S. (1999). Germany: A Short History. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. ISBN 978-0-8093-2231-2.
• Drinkwater, John F. (2007). Alamanni and Rome 213–496: Caracalla to Clovis. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-929568-5. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• "Germanic peoples". Retrieved 11 July 2018. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |encyclopedia= ignored (help)
• Grancsay, Stephen Vincent. "Metalwork: Teutonic Tribes". Retrieved 8 September 2019. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |encyclopedia= ignored (help)
• Hachmann, Rolf; Kossack, Georg; Kuhn, Hans (1962). Völker zwischen Germanen und Kelten (in German). Neumünster: K. Wachholtz.
• Hasenfratz, Hans-Peter (2011). Barbarian Rites: The Spiritual World of the Vikings and the Germanic Tribes. Simon and Schuster. ISBN 9781620554487.
• Hoad, T. F., ed. (1996). The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-283098-2.
• Katz, Solomon (1955). The Decline of Rome and the Rise of Mediaeval Europe. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. ASIN B007FTF9V4. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Kendrick, T.D. (2013). A History of the Vikings. New York: Fall River Press. ISBN 978-1-4351-4641-9. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Kennedy, Arthur Garfield (1963). "The Indo-European Language Family". In Lee, Donald Woodward (ed.). English Language Reader: Introductory Essays and Exercises. Dodd, Mead.
• Kinder, Hermann; Hilgemann, Werner (2004). The Penguin Atlas of World History (Vol 1). Harmondsworth and New York: Penguin Books. ISBN 978-0-14-101263-6.
• Kishlansky, Mark; Geary, Patrick; O'Brien, Patricia (2008). Civilization in the West. New York: Pearson Longman. ISBN 978-0-205-55684-7. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Kitchen, Martin (1996). The Cambridge Illustrated History of Germany. New York and London: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-45341-7. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Lamarcq, Danny; Rogge, Marc (1996). De Taalgrens: Van de oude tot de nieuwe Belgen [The Language Border: From the Old to the New Belgians] (in Dutch). Leuven: Davidsfond. ISBN 978-90-6152-960-6.
• Lawrence, William Witherle (1967). Beowulf and Epic Tradition. Hafner.
• Maas, Michael (2015). "Barbarians: Problems and Approaches". In Johnson, Scott Fitzgerald (ed.). The Oxford Handbook of Late Antiquity. Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780190277536.
• Magocsi, Paul Robert (2018). Historical Atlas of Central Europe: Third Revised and Expanded Edition. University of Toronto Press. ISBN 978-1487523312.
• MacCulloch, Diarmaid. Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years. New York: Penguin, 2011. ISBN 978-0-670-02126-0
• Mallory, J. P.; Adams, Douglas (1997). Encyclopedia of Indo-European culture. London and Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn. ISBN 978-1-884964-98-5.
• McDonald, J.D. (2005). "Y Haplogroups of the World (PDF map)" (PDF). University of Illinois. Retrieved 22 April 2015.
• Menéndez-Pidal, Ramón (1968). Manual de Gramática Histórica Español. Madrid: Espasa Calpe. ISBN 84-239-4755-6. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Mommsen, Theodor (1968). The Provinces of the Roman Empire: The European Provinces. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0226533956.
• Morgan, Kenneth (2001). The Oxford History of Britain. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-280135-7. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Murdoch, Brian; Read, Malcolm Kevin (2004). Early Germanic Literature and Culture. Boydell & Brewer. ISBN 157113199X.
• O'Callaghan, Joseph F. "Visigothic Spain to c. 500". Retrieved 8 September 2019. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |encyclopedia= ignored (help)
• O'Donnell, James (2008). The Ruin of the Roman Empire. New York: Harper Collins. ISBN 978-0-06-078741-7. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Osborne, Roger (2008). Civilization: A New History of the Western World. New York: Pegasus Books. ISBN 978-1-933648-76-7.
• Pagden, Anthony (2001). Peoples and Empires: A Short History of European Migration, Exploration, and Conquest, From Greece to the Present. New York: Modern Library. ISBN 978-0-679-64096-7. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Partridge, Eric (1966). Origins: Short Etymological Dictionary of Modern English. London: Routledge & K. Paul. ISBN 978-0-7100-1934-9.
• Pasley, Malcolm (1982). "Germanic and German". Germany: A Companion To German studies. Methuen. pp. 4–6. ISBN 9780416336603.
• Petit, Paul; MacMullen, Ramsay. "Ancient Rome: The Barbarian Invasions". Retrieved 12 July 2018. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |encyclopedia= ignored (help)
• Pop, Ioan Aurel (1996). Romanians and Hungarians from the 9th to the 14th century. Romanian Cultural Foundation. ISBN 9735770377.
• Pop, Ioan Aurel (1999). Romanians and Romania: A Brief History. East European Monographs. ISBN 0880334401.
• Price, T. Douglas (2015). "The Germanic Tribes". Ancient Scandinavia: An Archaeological History from the First Humans to the Vikings. Oxford University Press. pp. 253–255. ISBN 9780190231972.
• Roberts, J. M. (1996). A History of Europe. New York: Allen Lane. ISBN 978-0-9658431-9-5. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Roberts, J. M. (1997). A Short History of the World. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-511504-X. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Robertson, Orrin W. (2003). "The Germanic Language Family". Old English and its Closest Relatives: A Survey of the Earliest Germanic Languages. Routledge. ISBN 9781134849000.
• Santosuo, Antonio (2004). Barbarians, Marauders, and Infidels: The Ways of Medieval Warfare. New York: MJF Books. ISBN 978-1-56731-891-3. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Seneca, Lucius Annaeus (1776). Seneca's Morals. Gilb. Martin & Sons.
• Schulze, Hagen (2001). Germany: A New History. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-00545-7.
• Spaeth, John Duncan Ernst (1921). Old English Poetry. Princeton University Press.
• Speidel, Michael P. (2004). Ancient Germanic Warriors: Warrior Styles from Trajan's Column to Icelandic Sagas. Routledge. ISBN 1134384203.
• Stümpel, Gustav (1932). Name und Nationalität der Germanen. Eine neue Untersuchung zu Poseidonios, Caesar und Tacitus (in German). Leipzig: Dieterich Verlag.
• Sykes, Bryan (2006). Saxons, Vikings, and Celts: The Genetic Roots of Britain and Ireland. London: Bantam Press. ISBN 978-0-393-06268-7. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Tacitus, Cornelius (1832). Arthur Murphy (ed.). The Historical Annals of Cornelius Tacitus. Vol. Vol. III. Philadelphia: L. Johnson. OCLC 28482775. {{cite book}}: |volume= has extra text (help); Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Tacitus, Cornelius (1873). The History of Tacitus. Translated by Alfred John Church and W J Brodribb. London: Macmillan&Company. OCLC 154131285.
• "The Order of The Teutonic Knights of St. Mary's Hospital in Jerusalem, 1190–2012". The Imperial Teutonic Order.
• Thompson, E. A. "Theodoric". Retrieved 12 July 2018. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |encyclopedia= ignored (help)
• Thompson, Edward Arthur (1973). "Germanic Peoples". Encyclopaedia Britannica. Vol. 10. Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. pp. 243–246. ISBN 0852291736.
• Turville-Petre, E.O.G; Polomé, Edgar Charles. "Germanic religion and mythology". Retrieved 12 July 2018. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |encyclopedia= ignored (help)
• Ward-Perkins, Bryan (2005). The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-280728-1. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Well, Colin (1996). "Celts and Germans in the Rhineland". In Miranda Green (ed.). The Celtic World. New York: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-14627-2.
• Webster’s New World College Dictionary (2010). "Germanic". Collins Online Dictionary. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. {{cite web}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |editors= (help)
• Wells, Peter S. (2003). The Battle That Stopped Rome: Emperor Augustus, Arminius, and the Slaughter of the Legions in the Teutoburg Forest. New York: W.W. Norton. ISBN 978-0-39302-028-1.
• Wickham, Chris (2009). The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages, 400–1000. New York: Viking Press. ISBN 978-0-670-02098-0. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Williams, Derek (1998). Romans and Barbarians. New York: St. Martin's Press. ISBN 0-312-19958-9. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)

This list of "unused" sources highlights just how much academically relevant and substantive content has been removed in the past few months by a certain editor.--Obenritter (talk) 14:33, 19 March 2020 (UTC)

@Obenritter: whoever you are referring to it sounds both true, and also a bit oversimplified. On 23rd December 2019 the article had rapidly grown to >240,000 bytes, and there was clearly a POV conflict that was about to explode, and would keep coming back unless we made the article more focused on its own topic, rather than the topics of other articles. In any case, I put this list here for a reason, so please consider whether any should be used. Many of them are old, or tertiary sources, or sources cherry-picked to support one sentence. Some of the best ones were needed for sections which are now reduced. (Starting with the massive culture section which Krakkos moved out on 23rd December.) Concerning topics covered more on other articles, many of those also need work and I see them as part of the same project. The Early Germanic culture article which split out is now itself quite a large article.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 15:35, 19 March 2020 (UTC)

"Many of them are old, or tertiary sources, or sources cherry-picked to support one sentence." No further input given the ridiculousness of this comment (look at most of the sources again). Funny to hear you express this as cherry-picking when you have managed to Goffartize this entire page, while deleting out loads of whatever YOU decided was irrelevant content. Multiple sources are the way academic content stays objective...that is, if that is the goal here.--Obenritter (talk) 15:46, 19 March 2020 (UTC)

@Obenritter: Well I certainly object to that accusation, I'm afraid, though I am happy to be in a dialogue with you again. I don't think WP should ban mention of Goffart of course, as was the demand, but is that really what you wanted? Most importantly anyway, is that if you have suggestions about anything, please let's discuss in a practical way. I don't even know, honestly, what you want or don't want. Obviously you were one of the main editors of the article like I have been, and I don't remember any disagreement we could not talk through. The changes I made affected my old edits as much as anyone's. I wish more editors could have contributed to the difficult editing period this article had, and I certainly tried hard to get feedback and help.

What I really do feel strongly about is not any particular POV or author, but the article structure. This article needed a structure which ALLOWED coverage of different positions which scholars have. Our old versions failed. This article needed a structure which made it easier for article watchers to see bad and POV-pushing edits, and easier for good edits to find their right home. We had too much duplication and even deliberate de-structuring happening, and this was being enabled by our old editing. I feel both of us were not looking enough at the big picture, where a problem was building up.

I do therefore feel strongly that having this article try to cover every aspect of Germanic or Gothic history was a mistake. This is a BIG article. It just made problems on this article impossible to fix, and exposed the article to the dark arts of POV pushing. You remember the article was going to be about Luxembourgers and Afrikaners?--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 16:35, 19 March 2020 (UTC)

Duplicated content certainly needed removed as did much of the POV you reference. On that and on modern depictions of "Germanic peoples" we have always been in agreement. At no point did I ever state that I did not want or value Goffart's opinion, but I feel that other scholars like Burns, Williams, Schulze, Wolfram, Thompson, and Pohl have not been fully reflected in this article since so much of their opinion on a variety of matters is now missing entirely (even if small bits) with the restructuring that has occurred. If you will recall, I wanted to focus this article on ancient and Medieval Germanic peoples to the extent of possibly renaming the article even. Nonetheless, much of what has been deleted came from leading scholars on German history. Also a few experts on Rome who made relevant observations to this subject like Peter Wells, Peter Brown, Bryan Ward-Perkins, and Chris Wickham have also been removed entirely. Somebody has elected to replace their comments in some instances with what I would otherwise deem inferior sources, but what would I know...I am just a PhD scholar on European history. It's not that your efforts have not been worthy of recognition, it's just that in haste to "fix" the article, there has been omission of quality content to a greater extent than it deserved and instead of remedying this, you want to constantly reflect on how "bad" the article was without acknowledging or retaining what was good. You have essentially single-highhandedly deleted substantively supported content and rewritten the vast majority of this article.--Obenritter (talk) 17:13, 19 March 2020 (UTC)

@Obenritter: ok. Let me say, the way I worked was more or less forced upon me and it is NOT my idea that my restructuring is the end of the job. This article needs new input to look for bits I might not have put back together well. I think the article started growing in the wrong direction and you seem to think I blame you but I see myself as another of the editors responsible for the previous versions. Perhaps on our own in a smaller group the article would have been much better, but we had more opinions at work that we did not resolve early enough.

• I would say that Pohl was more missing in the older version, and that I have added a lot of his position? Much of what has been hated about Goffart by some people on WP is also in Pohl by the way. This is a very important one! If you like Walter Pohl maybe please look at his article by the way.
• Concerning Wolfram I feel I have not removed him, and he is still a presence in the article, but let me know.
• Shulze, on 23 December 2019, was used for one etymology, and there has been quite some discussion about that. Wickham was only used for a sentence saying "Over time, the Anglo-Saxons, with their distinct culture and language, displaced much of the extant Roman influence of old".

Comparing to 23 December I can see all or most of the others tended to be in the now shortened history sections, and like with these last two it tended to be in sentences were going away from basic "Germanic peoples" issues, and also not particularly in need of a specialist source, or notably different from many other sources. In any case I have no strong feelings about these, have not read them, and am open to discussions. BTW you assume I removed everything but the history of the article starting 23 December is a bit more complicated than that. I did however shorten the history sections, trying to (I think for the first time) only write about turning points for "Germanic peoples" overall in a big way. Though it was for a logical reason, I found this a difficult process and consider it unfinished. I would like to review it with others. OTOH we do not need to cite every good writer just for the sake of it either of course. The article length and focus is a concern. The question is "what else do we need?" (and is there anything more we can remove?)--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 19:05, 19 March 2020 (UTC)

BTW I should have mentioned that Burns is back in since I posted the above list. But not in the history section. So many questions come down to how much narrative history of Rome needs to be in this article. But it should be kept in mind that it is still a big major of the article even though other articles should be covering details of events and I have tried add to, and focus on, turning points for the Germanic peoples as a whole. I think the history section deserves slow and careful consideration and discussion about what should or should not be in it. It is certainly not difficult to make it much bigger, but the article is already big.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 08:42, 20 March 2020 (UTC)

Further reading (please review if we really need any of these)

• Aston, Florence (1915). Stories From German History: From Ancient Times To The Year 1648. George G. Harrap and Company.
• Beck, Heinrich and Heiko Steuer and Dieter Timpe, eds. Die Germanen. Studienausgabe. Reallexikon der germanischen Altertumskunde. Berlin, New York: Walter de Gruyter 1998. Xi + 258 pp. ISBN 3-11-016383-7.
• "Germans". Retrieved 12 July 2018. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |encyclopedia= ignored (help)
• Bosworth, Joseph (1848). The Origin of the English, Germanic and Scandinavian Languages and Nations: With a Sketch of Their Early Literature. Longman.
• Gummere, Francis Barton (1892). Germanic Origins: A Study in Primitive Culture. D. Nutt. ISBN 9780521794237.
• Hayes, Carlton Huntley (1909). An Introduction To The Sources Relating To The Germanic Invasions. Columbia University.
• Hinds, Kathryn (2010). Early Germans. Marshall Cavendish. ISBN 978-0761445159.
• Krüger, Bruno [in German]. Die Germanen [The Germanic Peoples] (in German). Vol. 1. Akad.-Verlag. ISBN 978-0761445159.
• Thompson, E. A. (1965). The Early Germans. Clarendon Press.
• Todd, Malcolm (1975). The Northern Barbarians, 100 B.C.-A.D. 300. Hutchinson. ISBN 0091222206.
• Udolph, Jürgen. Namenkundliche Studien zum Germanenproblem. DeGruyter, Berlin 1994, ISBN 3-11-014138-8

Comment. The Reallexikon der germanischen Altertumskunde editions are of course potentially very useful, but I can not access them all. They now have a website with the most updated material. Possibly some Wikipedians have access to it?--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 10:39, 20 February 2020 (UTC)

Another one removed

For reference:--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 08:17, 21 February 2020 (UTC)

• Bury, J. B. (1928). The Invasion of Europe by the Barbarians. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. ISBN 978-0-393-00388-8. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)

Back to the etymology question

@Austronesier, Florian Blaschke, Obenritter, Ermenrich, and Krakkos: Do any of you have institutional and or any other type of access to the updated online version of the Reallexikon der Germanischen Altertumskunde? Concerning the etymology of Germani, my reading (playing various tricks to see more pages) of the 1998 discussion (by Neumann) is that there is a least worst theory. I wonder if they still see it this way. The article says the least assailable proposal is a modified version of one by Much that connects the name to the same root German "begehren". Overall though they are saying there is no really convincing theory.

With some uncertainty about what to do with this question, I should at least post a link to the now archived discussion [1]. The obvious place to discuss etymologies is this section of the article which already has linking to the long discussion in the 1998 edition of the Reallexikon der Germanischen Altertumskunde, edited by Rosemarie Müller. --Andrew Lancaster (talk) 19:09, 22 February 2020 (UTC)

Sadly I no longer have access to the Reallexikon online. I will note that outside of specific discussions of the etymology of Germani the Celtic origin theory is often mentioned, e.g. Salmons History of German, [2], Young/Gloning, History of German through Texts, p. 63. For this reason alone it probably deserves mention, even if it's not actually the most likely or widespread etymology.--Ermenrich (talk) 20:06, 22 February 2020 (UTC)

The proposal that it must be Celtic seems to go back to Jacob Grimm? Wolfram is one person in recent times who repeats that. In the past this article always mentioned the spear-people theory and the loud or swelling idea. I am not giving up on finding a solution but I am still not sure where to draw the line, if we do have any extra discussion on this side issue. More opinions and comments anyone?--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 20:13, 22 February 2020 (UTC)

@Andrew Lancaster: While I have this original work (book), Neumann shows up a few times. His mentions of begehren in this context relate to the first use of the term by Becker and Holder, and then asserts that this was the result of an incorrect translation that would have been better rendered as "Erwünschte haben/bringen". (p. 83) Theretofore, I am not sure what it is you are wanting. Also, I was not under the impression that you were functionally fluent in German either. Is this the case? --Obenritter (talk) 22:12, 23 February 2020 (UTC)

@Obenritter:, German is not my first language, but I have been happy to get some practice while working on this. Let me know if you see any errors of course. If you have the 1998 printed book which is on google books, as per some of the citations I have been making, then yes as mentioned above Neumann says that his modified version of a Much proposal seems to be "least worst" (to convert to an English idiom). Not a strong recommendation. For now, what I have put in the article is that the etymology is unknown, or that there is no consensus about it, and that is the best and least controversial summary. So my practical question here is whether we need to say more. My initial question above is whether anyone has access to newer "authoritative" comments on such theories.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 22:33, 23 February 2020 (UTC)

Florian Blaschke concerning this old etymology question, I will just note one of us has taken a position in the article now: [3]. Personally, I feel it is undue deference to the old Celtic theory, but at least it is only in a footnote.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 08:12, 28 March 2020 (UTC)

Discussion relevant to this article, on less watched article. Topics include Walter Goffart as source.

As Heruli is not much watched, it would be good to get more community input on events there which certainly involve sources relevant to this article. In short: (1) approximately 1 third of the article including 6 sources was deleted in a major revert, [4]; (2) the only clear rationale given so far is that Walter Goffart was mentioned as a source in some of the new material. (But Goffart is not one of the 6 sources deleted, and was already in the article, and still is.) That issue has clearly come up here before also.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 09:11, 11 March 2020 (UTC)

Posted only at Heruli, though it is about Scirri, this appears to also be part of this same systematic work which is relevant to this article [5]--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 12:20, 11 March 2020 (UTC)

Just so we do not loose it: Main attempt to defend the Heruli revert by Thomas.W has been led by Krakkos at User_talk:Thomas.W#Heruli. It is certainly about Goffart, and involves the interpretation of Goffart and other sources which has been proposed on Wikipedia by Krakkos. The discussion leads me to feel concerned about edits being made on the articles of living scholars like Walter Pohl and Walter Goffart.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 07:36, 13 March 2020 (UTC)

As a result of those discussions, I have posted some notes about what some scholars really say about the unity and continuity of Germanic peoples here. I think a notable source of confusion and dramatization on Wikipedia is that there are many quite specific technical debates, such as the debate about Goffart's vision of "accommodation", and Heather vs Amory on Ostrogothic continuity, and so on, which have ZERO necessary connection to the discussion which has obsessed Wikipedia: which I think of as a "unity and continuity" debate. On that point, Heather uses old style unified terminology in practice (placing Goths and Franks in one category), like Liebeschuetz would want, but his discussions about the theory show him accepting that at least in theory this unity in terminology is misleading. I think another thing thoroughly confusing Wikipedia is the use of snippet quotes to create caricatures and make people upset. Hence my summary of Goffart's own summary of his real concerns about how terminology can lead to biased conclusions might be useful:

• 1. Barbarian invasions were not a single collective movement: different barbarian groups moved for their own reasons under their own leaders. (And not all of them even moved. There was no massive inevitable single chain of billiard ball migrations.)
• 2. The pressures on the late Empire did not have a united source, and often came from within. (Side note: Heather seems much more interested in the debate about whether pressures came mainly from within. Perhaps he deliberately unites all Germanic peoples because that terminology helps his case in that other debate.)
• 3. The classical Germanic peoples lacked any unity or center, and so they should not be seen as a civilization in the same way Rome is. This is a concern Halsall has taken on board. The Liebeschuetz quotes I have selected show Goffart is completely correct about this concern.
• 4. We can not accept Jordanes as preserving an authentic oral tradition about migration from Scandinavia. (Heather fully agrees. Though he does not like Goffart's proposal that Jordanes knowingly wrote in a politically sensitive way, during a period when Goths were a highly charged topic in Constantinople, calling that a "conspiracy theory", this does not have a massive impact for us.)--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 09:11, 19 March 2020 (UTC)

The issue with this view (not especially Goffart's but the one you follow in your edits in general) is that is it does not go well with linguistic evidence. If Germanic peoples were not a civilization, they clearly shared the same language during the first century BCE, as runic inscriptions from the first centuries CE only show dialectal variations of a same language from Central Germany to Scandinavia. The euphemistic formulation of the article ("They are also associated with Germanic languages, which many of them probably spoke") does not seem justified: what other language was spoken then? Can you name one? Or are we following the mistakes of Classical authors who wrongly identified some remote Celtic tribes as Germanic (e.g., the "Heruli" were described as Scythians)? Azerty82 (talk) 10:50, 20 March 2020 (UTC)

PS: I'm not saying Germanic peoples formed a "nation" sharing a "state language". But I've seen your draft on Liebeschuetz and Goffart, and I think that we should follow specialists (i.e. linguists) rather than historians on linguistic matters. For instance (emphasizes are mine), "it is unclear when and where PGmc. evolved as a “condensation” of an individualized culture or of a quasi-individualized ethnos. (...) During the first two centuries CE the Gmc. dialect continuum covered roughly the territory between the Rhine in the west, the Vistula in the east, and the Danube in the south, including Denmark and southern Scandinavia in the north. (...) The N/WGmc. “residual” dialect continuum was broken after Angles, Jutes, and (parts of the) Saxons left their homelands to settle in Britain." (Nedoma (2017), The documentation of Germanic. In: "Handbook of Comparative and Historical Indo-European Linguistics"). Azerty82 (talk) 11:14, 20 March 2020 (UTC)

PS2: from your draft, no linguist is arguing that Goths and Franks could understand each others in, say, the 6th century CE. East Germanic tribes broke the dialectal continuum earlier (probably in the first or second century BCE). It is not clear whether the article is discussing Germanic peoples in the 5 c. BCE or in the 9th c. CE. One could wrongly say that Latins did not speak a mutually intelligible language during the Roman Republic because French and Italians spoke different Romance languages in the 7th century CE (!). Azerty82 (talk) 11:22, 20 March 2020 (UTC)

Thanks for your feedback. When you refer to my "article" or "draft" I think you are referring to the notes about why Goffart and how he makes people angry. So the first thing is that it is not necessarily my opinion at all. I am just showing that some things Goffart says are not controversial. Concerning the relevant period, the way I understand Goffart, and this is one of things people don't realize when they see isolated quotes, he is mainly talking about "late antiquity". So as you say, this means that that many aspects of what he says agrees with all or most scholars. Actually the unity (or lack of unity) of Germanic peoples in the first century BCE is not what is causing debates on WP, or between historians as far as I can see.

Concerning how to edit WP, I think what you say about being careful of historians (whether Goffart or Liebeschuetz or whoever) is very logical, but not always easy. Maybe one practical problem: such publications are less widely distributed and more difficult for me to define and get my hands on sometimes. If you can point us to more and better sources, great. But anyway please note that WP editing problems have by no means involved anyone bringing such sources and having them rejected. Once again: the context is that WP has been disrupted by editors who see Goffart as an author to be literally angry about.

Technical points "If Germanic peoples were not a civilization, they clearly shared the same language during the first century BCE". Here I guess you are using two assumptions that are questioned by scholars.

• First you use a linguistic definition of Germanic peoples, but you are applying it to real peoples in history for whom we have almost no linguistic evidence. This can give a known logical problem. See the remarks of Pohl I cite on that Goffart diccussion page, or the quote from Burns on the current version of this article. As long as you simply define Germanic peoples by language there is no logical problem, because it is a tautology, but you do not know which peoples from history are included or not included. Once a linguist starts making claims about historical peoples based on texts or archaeology, things get multidiscplinary.
• Second you are assuming that the proto-languages actually existed as unified languages. This is not a necessary assumption that linguists make anymore, although of course it can be true. But by the way, I think this does not touch on any debates relevant to WP editing that I've seen lately. It is just me making a technical point. It relates to the bigger conclusion that actually languages do not need to develop as family trees at all. They can for example merge, and in an enclosed area, languages can keep merging and splitting in an ever-changing Sprachbund which never needs to become one language.

An example of a Germanic people who probably did not speak a Germanic language would be the Eburones, or Ubii. So the original Germanic peoples at the time of Caesar were probably not one people except from Caesar's political/military viewpoint. To the extent that they evolved into one group of peoples their origins were "polycentric" (to use the terminology of many of the Vienna scholars these days). The Rhine Germani who were probably the "real" Germani at first, probably did not speak Germanic. The Elbe/Jastorf/Suebian Germanic peoples, who the Romans hardly knew in the time of Caesar, really did become dominant in a much larger area, and it seems like their languages spread to the Rhine somehow though it may have been quite late. (The second German consonant shift happened maybe 600, and before then it seems all continental West Germanic in the north and south must have been almost the same language. How did that happen? I actually don't see many writers ever even getting to that question, let alone answering it. If you have any good things to read, please let me know.)--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 12:53, 20 March 2020 (UTC)

Thank you for your comprehensive answer. First of all, I have no issue with Goffart as long as he is only referring to the Migration Period to argue for a “fragmentation” of the Germanic concept.

To clarify, I don’t “assume that the proto-language actually existed as unified language”, but that they spoke mutually intelligible idioms in the first centuries BCE (plural, let me correct here a typo in my original answer). Mutual intelligibility is the most common definition for a shared language, even a poly-centric or multi-dialectal one like Serbo-Croatian.

That said, I agree with the following; we cannot conclude from this assumption that they shared a common culture, even though the name of deities are closed cognates and clearly inherited from a common belief (e.g., *Tīwaz as a proto-Germanic sky and war god, from which derive ON Týr, OE Tīw, OHG Zio, Gothic *Teiws)

The issue with most of the tribes you’re citing is that they were “transitional” entities dwelling between the Germanic and Celtic worlds. They could have been Celticized Germans or Germanicized Celts (language obviously does not equal genetics; it is probable that non-Germanic tribes adopted Germanic languages following their progressive migrations. The same model is used to explain the diffusion of Celtic languages, and even Indo-European languages in general).

PS: the second Germanic consonant shift emerged in the southern part of present-day Germany. Only Old High German was affected, not Old English or Old Dutch: “This started in the south of the speech-area (Upper German) and spread north with diminishing force. Implementation thus varies from dialect to dialect and according to date.” (Patrick V. Stiles, HCHIEL p. 892)

For a good introduction on Germanic linguistics, I would advise “Handbook of Comparative and Historical Indo-European Linguistics” (HCHIEL; Volume II; 2017), with chapters written by Robert Nedoma, Patrick V. Stiles, Jón Axel Harðarson, Rosemarie Lühr and Joseph Salmons). Donald Ringe’s “From Proto-Indo-European to Proto-Germanic” (2006) is also a quite comprehensive monograph on the subject. Azerty82 (talk) 14:17, 20 March 2020 (UTC)

Thanks. Most of this is just interesting to me and not necessarily relevant to this article, but...

• Yes, but really I don't see anything special about Goffart. Many academics have been involved in controversies. WP policy tells us how to handle controversies. If we work that way there should be no problem. The concern with some of our Germanic articles is that there has been a real effort made to create drama, anger and panic about the fact that his name has appeared somewhere in a footnote. Actually he has long been cited in many WP articles, and the problem I am referring to is quite artificial. Most of the scholarly controversies involving Goffart are NOT about Germanic identity in late antiquity, where Liebeschuetz is in the minority and also disagrees with Pohl and Heather, but for example about things we are not even covering yet on WP.
• Sprachbunden which include non-mutually intelligible languages are possible, and were probably normal for large parts of human prehistory. Aboriginal Australian languages are sometimes seen as an example, and in such cases multilingualism is a constant, and partly caused by the need to seek marriage partners from afar. But for our purposes here this is probably not relevant. (It could have been if we assume proto-Germanic had a very large range.)
• You are again equating Germanic language to Germanic peoples here? Nothing wrong with that, except that it does not help us with what you call the transitional cases (which might have been the normal cases).
• The fact is that we don't know what they spoke, but anyway they were just normal people, no more "transitional" than people on the Elbe or people on the Seine? It could have been a third language. Multilingualism may have been common too. Europe seems to have had many small cultural groups. In terms of big language families, their historical links were to the Celtic world when Caesar met them, and Germanic might not have been very widespread at all at that time. Caesar then defined geography for military reasons, and THAT was the only thing that made the Rhine "transitional". We can only see it that way because we see it through his definition. (I suppose we can also argue that LATER, his vision changed reality, and perhaps also his predictions partly came true, with the Elbe German culture being very influential in a bigger area.)
• Yes but I am not sure if you are seeing my point. (Which has nothing to do with any WP concern at the moment.) The implication is that in the time of Clovis, for example (ie BEFORE the shift), there was ONE single proto language ancestral to Bavarian and Dutch, and so on, with almost no dialectical differences. Where did it come from? Or perhaps it is an example of what we discussed above - an illusion of an homogeneous reconstructed language, created by the fact that the later dialects did not work like a family tree, but more like a Sprachbund. One reason I find the question interesting is that the implied homogeneity of 500 AD makes old ideas about a distinct Rhineland (Istvaeonic) branch of Germanic already existing in the time of Tacitus very difficult to believe in. My understanding is that linguists have indeed rejected those old ideas, but I have not yet seen it all laid out in a continuous discussion. This is an example of something the historians are not good for.
• I was hoping for more than an introduction, but I don't have that one and will see what I can find. Thanks.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 14:50, 20 March 2020 (UTC)

Sorry, I don't have the time to answer all the points but there was no "single proto-language ancestral to Bavarian and Dutch" after the disappearance of Proto-Germanic. Bavarian comes from Old High German (Irminonic) while Old Dutch is a variety of Old Frankish (Istvaeonic; from which also derives the Central German dialects). Irvinonic and Irminonic are not proto-languages but a grouping of similar dialects (like Gallo-Romance, Ibero-Romance, etc.) Azerty82 (talk) 15:22, 20 March 2020 (UTC)

Fair enough it is a side issue. I also don't have all sources ready to throw into this discussion, as I have been reading this out of own interest while working on other things. But what you are saying is what the older books say. One problem with what you are saying is that there is minimal evidence of OTHER differences (apart from the consonantal innovation) between these supposedly anciently separated dialect groups. In other words, there is no sign of ancient dialect divisions in West Germanic, except the North sea-influenced group. The main distinction between early Irminonic and Istvaeonic is a sound shift which is now estimated to have happened 600 AD.

Coming back to this article, and not my Goffart userspace page, the sentence you cited so far is the second one of the lead. Although it is a lead sentence, given all the possible controversy it has a long footnote citing Wolfram, Pohl and Burns. It is not really a Goffarty sentence IMHO. The rationale for the sentence is that the history of this article shows that (a) everyone wants it to include coverage of a linguistically defined Germanic people and (b) no one wants this article to be purely about languages, but also about the groups named by classical authors and historians. Luckily, the secondary sources of our time have been facing the same type of issue, and hence the footnotes help explain the latest thinking. --Andrew Lancaster (talk) 16:19, 20 March 2020 (UTC)

I have nothing to say about the article, it is rather good indeed. I would just add information about the pre-Roman period based on reliable sources and well-accepted arguments.

ps:The second Germanic shift is not the only distinctive feature separating the two groups. How would you explain the Ingvaeonic nasal spirant law, shared by Old Frisian and Old English? ;-) (the Anglo-Saxon migration occurred in the 5th c. CE) Azerty82 (talk) 17:12, 20 March 2020 (UTC)

@Azerty82: suggestions on the pre-Roman period welcome. Concerning the other point yes, that is the Ingvaeonic distinction which is not yet rejected, the way I understand it. So West Germanic has gone from 3 groups to 2.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 18:31, 20 March 2020 (UTC)

@Andrew Lancaster:, I'm going to write a draft on the pre-Roman period this week-end. Note that my knowledge of Germanic cultures mainly come from the fields of linguistics, classical literature and comparative mythology (i.e. Indo-European studies). A list of RS on the archeology of the Nordic Bronze Age is thus welcome. Best regards, Azerty82 (talk) 14:01, 27 March 2020 (UTC)

@Azerty82: it sounds good. A few things to keep in mind apart from the basic fact and source collection:

• Can it fit this into the existing structure or will there need to be changes such as a new section (if so, will that create duplications or otherwise create structure issues).
• Could it end up creating an article length issue? Perhaps a solution is to work in such a way that smaller additions are made here, but bigger additions to other detailed "child" articles such as Early Germanic Culture.

FWIW my feeling is that on this article it is important to distinguish the sections which have no other "main article", meaning this article has to have the best discussion on WP, and those where it might be easier to work in parallel on whatever the "main article" is, in order to constantly consider what needs to be in the summary version here.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 15:45, 27 March 2020 (UTC)

Yes the idea is to summarize the essential facts and main theories related to Germanic tribes during the pre-Roman period (i.e. the introduction section of the most erudite works). I known Krakkos is working on the article Early Germanic culture, so he'll provide a complementary perspective to the subject, although my contributions won't be limited to the cultural part. Anyway, I'll be working on a draft before publishing my results here. Azerty82 (talk) 18:10, 27 March 2020 (UTC)

@Azerty82: The pending rewrite of Early Germanic culture will discuss the cultural aspects of Germanic origins and history. Much of this information will certainly be of relevance to this article.

Your work at Proto-Indo-European mythology, Indo-European cosmogony and Proto-Indo-European society are excellent, and this article would certainly benefit from your contributions. For information on the Nordic Bronze Age and Germanic peoples i would recommend the following sources:

• Heather, Peter. "Germany: Ancient History". Encyclopædia Britannica Online. Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. Retrieved February 22, 2020. {{cite web}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Mallory, J. P. (1991). "Germans". In Search of the Indo-Europeans: Language Archeology and Myth. Thames & Hudson. pp. 84–87. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameters: |registration= and |subscription= (help); Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Mallory, J. P.; Adams, Douglas Q. (1997). Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture. Taylor & Francis. ISBN 9781884964985. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameters: |subscription= and |registration= (help); Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Polomé, Edgar C. (1987). "Who Are The Germanic People?". In Skomal, Susan Nacev; Polomé, Edgar C. (eds.). Proto-Indo-European: The Archaeology of a Linguistic Problem. The Journal of Indo-European Studies Monograph Series. Vol. 1. pp. 216–244. ISBN 0-941694-29-1. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Polomé, Edgar C. (2004). "Methodological Aspects of Glotto- and Ethnogenesis of the Germanic people". In Ureland, Per Sture (ed.). Entstehung von Sprachen und Völkern. Walter de Gruyter. pp. 45–70. ISBN 9783111633732. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• (Very useful source) Price, T. Douglas (2015). Ancient Scandinavia: An Archaeological History from the First Humans to the Vikings. Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780190231972. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameters: |subscription= and |registration= (help); Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Schmidt, Karl Horst [in German] (1991). "The Celts and the Ethnogenesis of the Germanic People". Historische Sprachforschung. 104 (1). Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht: 129–152. JSTOR 40849016. Retrieved February 3, 2020. {{cite journal}}: Cite has empty unknown parameters: |layurl=, |laydate=, |nopp=, and |laysource= (help); Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Thomas, Homer L. (1992). "Archaeology and Indo-European Comparative Linguistics". In Polomé, Edgar C. (ed.). Reconstructing Languages and Cultures. Walter de Gruyter. pp. 281–315. ISBN 9783110126716. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)

If you have trouble accessing these sources i can send them to you by email. Krakkos (talk) 18:44, 27 March 2020 (UTC)

Thanks for the bibliography and your kind comment on my previous work Krakkos. Polomé (1987) is the only source I couldn't locate among those you listed. Azerty82 (talk) 21:05, 27 March 2020 (UTC)

Agenda Anyone

The statement, "the tendency of some historians to describe late Roman historical events in terms of Germanic language speakers has been criticized by some scholars because it implies a single coordinated group" implies that lots of scholars tend to share this view, which is not the case. This does not belong in the lead of this article and is utter bunk. The mere notion of peoples who speak a related language does not make them some monolith and scholars of German history (myself included) do not make that argument in general terms. Such a sweeping statement followed by a very controversial remark from Goffart also implies that he has the last word on this matter. Worse, the notion that there is debate about the existence of Germanic peoples from antiquity is couched under two separate and very much related claims both designed to delegitimize the notion that such people ever existed. It represents bad scholarship that reeks of an agenda. What these Germanic people are called in modern terms does not trump their existence because contemporaries called them something different; this ignores the diffuse relationships between their cultures, religion, manner of fighting, and related languages. Not every scholar of antiquity convinced that the ancient Germanic peoples once dominated north and central Europe—despite being in various but related groups—is some imperialist Nazi sympathizer who remains wedded to the 19th century ideas of race and nation. This article needs to be rewritten to reflect the divergent points of view more effectively and with much less hyperbole.--Obenritter (talk) 01:50, 25 March 2020 (UTC)

@Obenritter: there is a lot to unpack there in terms of generalized accusations, and it might be easier to make concrete proposals one by one, where we can look at real sources and the real words in our article. However, I'll try to answer every point in a compact way first:

• I think the terms "some scholars" is an accurate and careful description of the field. It just means more than one. Any less mention would mean Censoring it completely, OTOH, which would be a big call?
• The specific proposal of Goffart about terminology (not "existence" which is a word that confuses the issue) is clearly very well-known and discussed (and widely respected). MOS:LEDE says: "It should identify the topic, establish context, explain why the topic is notable, and summarize the most important points, including any prominent controversies." It is being presented as a minority position, which is actually arguably unfair for that particular position. (See below.)
• I do not think Goffart's opinion is being presented as the "last word" but as one of the most prominent criticisms, it must be mentioned. Your description of Goffart's influence on this lead is also extremely exaggerated and unfair. It is clearly not based on reading the lead or the sources.
• Concerning "debate about the existence" in all honestly this must be coming from prior angry ideas about Goffart, and not by what is in our current article, either in the lead itself or the body which the lead should (and hopefully does) refer to here. What you will find instead is that there is doubt about the unity and continuity of the Germanic peoples (which you agree with?) not worded as a doubt about "existence" (which would, I think, worry you):

• Field consensus which even Heather and Ward-Perkins pay lip service to: there is doubt about whether late Roman-era Germanic peoples were all unified by any single unique shared culture, collective consciousness, or even language.
• An attributed remark which uses Goffart to represent a strongish version of a commonly accepted practical point (as mentioned above): Walter Goffart, for example, has gone so far as to suggest that historians should avoid the term when discussing that period. Honestly I think this is very cautious. What I constantly see in the literature is that many scholars feel Goffart's point was already widely accepted before he made it. It is probably important to note that on Wikipedia, due to the efforts of some editors, Goffart's words are routinely caricatured by cherry picking small bits, in the way you have done. See my notes about that here.
• Description of an undeniably prominent debate, associated with the Vienna school: there is a connected debate concerning the extent to which any significant Germanic traditions apart from language, even smaller scale tribal traditions, survived after Roman times

• Of course "imperialist Nazi sympathizer" also simply does not appear in the text of our article. You are exaggerating and not engaging with our real article text, which is not helpful or fair.

OTOH the Nazi associations of certain methodology mistakes which are still being made, are constantly mentioned in literature about this subject: Liebeschuetz, Todd, Halsall, Wolfram, etc. It is a constant in our expert sources. So once again, I feel WP:Censorship would be a big call? And once again I also feel your reading of the lead text is extremely exaggerated and based more upon concerns that can only come from a certain Wikipedia editor who has been distorting the sources and the work of Wikipedians? In general though, these are all sensitive issues that I've tried very hard to balance right, with reference to MANY sources. I think therefore that we need to walk through any concerns carefully and thoughtfully.

You mention agendas as your title for this whole theme. Let's consider this ad hominem accusation. Frankly, there is clearly a lot of anger about such topics that has been deliberately promoted among some WP editors, and which existed long before my recent lead changes. This is distorting the way people read and write. I have seen claims by one editor involved of there being off-wiki correspondence critical of my editing recently on this article. Whether you are involved in those or not, such efforts (also on-Wiki) explain why people use the same wordings about Goffart on WP, which do not reflect real sources, or accusations about me which do not reflect the article text. I do not think that approach is helping any of us make a better Wikipedia.

It would be much better to put concerns into concrete and detailed terms mentioning real sources, and edits I really made. I think that trying to guess and then publicize what my inner thoughts might be, is not going to be easier than just asking me what my thoughts are. If you have not tried that, then you should not be accusing me of any "agenda"?--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 08:22, 25 March 2020 (UTC)

Putting cards on the table, though no one else does:

• I think Walter Pohl might be the author who has most influenced my changes to the lead and first section. But it would be a close call, and honestly wouldn't make a big difference because there is a lot of agreement between the sources.
• I do not have a conscious recollection of being interested in Goffart in the past. I had to start reading him carefully recently, due to the fact that he is constantly being mentioned in our sources and talk pages. I do not see myself as a fan, though he is clearly worthy of respect and is widely respected, both for his non-controversial ideas, and at least some of his controversial ones.
• As someone who jumps between different editing topics, I find all the trumped-up drama on these articles unbelievable, in the sense that it is rare to find a field where scholars write so often and so clearly about their own field, and they all seem to describe it the same way, in terms of both what is widely agreed, and what isn't agreed. (This doesn't mean I've got every detailed perfectly balanced yet, but we never seem to be able to get to detailed discussions. The caricatures always intervene. We can't get beyond all positions of Goffart being collapsed into one sentence.)
• Liebeschuetz for example defends the unity and continuity assumptions for the Germanic people not from "Goffart" alone but also from Pohl and many others; he also reads them properly and does not over-focus on Goffart's "existence" wording, but clearly understanding that it is (for all involved) a question of whether there was a unity and continuity of "the" Germanic peoples in late antiquity - both as one unity, and as several larger older unities. Remarkably, he even defends his position in the same way the the new sceptics say it is defended: he says it is important because if we give up this model we can't describe Europe as the result of two civilizations.
• Partly on the basis of such reading I did not focus on Goffart's "existence" wording, despite all the accusations now flying around, but upon what all these scholars explain to be their point where they agree to disagree: continuity and unity in late antiquity.
• Do I agree with Liebeschuetz? Well, indeed I can not see why we need to describe Europe as the result of only two parties: Rome versus the Germanic peoples. However, this does not make me "Goffartized", and anyway I have no problem that we should report all scholarly positions.
• My current thinking: The problems making discussion so difficult on WP are entirely artificial, and not an accurate representation of any mainstream scholarly positions.
• Wikipedia is not even close to having to deal with some of the more thorny problems such as how to explain the differences between Goffart and Pohl. That is perhaps beyond our abilities, and outside our project aims.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 12:01, 25 March 2020 (UTC)

So much for your "compact" response. You've seemed to latch onto the idea of the Germanic peoples as a monolith far too much, which is where I think your editorial approach to the subject went awry. That's why it feels like an agenda is present. Germanic peoples was plural for a reason.--Obenritter (talk) 15:15, 25 March 2020 (UTC)

It has been a monolith (or a gorilla in the room) for some years, and I am not the cause of that. Sources were consistently twisted, poor sources were preferred on key sentences, and many sections were swamped by nonsense, and duplicated in mangled forms all over the place. So the gorilla is clearly important to some people! The simple reality is that I have simply been doing the best I can to fix basic structural problems and ADD a LOT of material which was never in the article, such as real references to Pohl's discussions on the core topic of this article. It would have been better to have had more help from other constructive editors. Obviously that has not happened yet, but let's hope it will happen. Wikipedia articles are never finished.

Do you, for example, have any actual sentences or sources you would like to point to for discussion? Just based on your remarks so far I have already tried to tweak a few things today.

Concerning whether scholars think the Germanic concept can lead to systematic bias in conclusions, they certainly do. I've now spent several months reading masses of material on Germanic peoples, and it is continually mentioned in 21st century publications, especially in German sources. Apparently this is often under the influence of Pohl rather than Goffart. Even Heather and Ward-Perkins pay lip service to this methodological issue, and there are many examples given in the sources of the types of conclusions which it biases for.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 16:34, 25 March 2020 (UTC)

Andrew Lancaster, you say you're "Putting cards on the table, though no one else does" and "It would have been better to have had more help from other constructive editors." May I say that your posting of ever-multiplying walls of text here effectively obscures any particular points (and there are so many of those) you're trying to make. It seems to me that your attempts at micro-managing the conversation only muddy the issues and scare constructive editors away; it's too overwhelming to consider all at once. I think you would do better to determine what you think the three very most important issues are, state them in a concise couple of paragraphs here (forgetting the details for now), and seek comment on just those issues, rather than trying to address all your concerns at the same time. Carlstak (talk) 03:08, 26 March 2020 (UTC)

@Carlstak: point taken and accepted. However in this particular case I was answering a long, misleading and loaded post, which was about me personally. So I never had a proposal to discuss here, but was only answering some vague and misleading accusations. Maybe I should have just asked for concrete editing suggestions from the beginning. There do not, in any case, appear to be any at this stage. As mentioned though, I have tried to make some tweaks to the article based on the initial post.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 07:55, 26 March 2020 (UTC)

Interesting that you would take the original remarks so personal. Nowhere was your name to be found. Your constant hyperbolic and obscenely long Talk Page overreactions to any disagreement with content are exactly why you've gotten so little collaboration. As @Carlstak: has implied, you might be "muddying" things enough to dissuade otherwise substantive help. Meanwhile, you come to Talk Pages and tell other editors that their editing—across all of Wikipedia evidently—demonstrates no knowledge of the authors mentioned in the text. Is that what you call constructive collaboration? --Obenritter (talk) 19:32, 26 March 2020 (UTC)

That would be muddying. Please let's only mention what real sources say, or edits which are really on WP. WP is WP:NOT an internet forum or therapy. As discussed on your user talk page, your constant attempts to guess things about me, including whether I read more than you, or have whatever academic qualifications you claim to have, are NOT relevant. I am not editing based on any such claims, and none of us should. I am naming the sources I am looking at afresh, and working as a Wikipedian. I would welcome constructive discussion with editors working the same way, including you of course.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 07:17, 27 March 2020 (UTC)

Feedback requested on 8 (hopefully) minor points

Thank you to Obenritter for tagging etc within the articles. Between the two of us, several small improvements have been done, however concerning some of the tags I have my doubts and it might be easier if other editors looked instead of me.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 15:34, 27 March 2020 (UTC)

TLDR

Footnote formats. I have to say I find these particular changes are small steps backwards, because the article has long suffered from thickets of small footnotes, and I prefer bundles where possible. But is that just my "taste"? 1. <ref>{{harvtxt|Pohl|2006|p=11}}; {{harvtxt|Kaul|Martens|1995}}; {{harvtxt|Goffart|2006|p=282}}</ref> -> {{sfn|Pohl|2006|p=11}}{{sfn|Kaul|Martens|1995}}{{sfn|Goffart|2006|p=282}} 2. <ref>{{Harvtxt|Wolfram|1997|p=6}}; Caesar, ''Gallic Wars'', [http://data.perseus.org/citations/urn:cts:latinLit:phi0448.phi001.perseus-eng1:1.47 1.47], [http://data.perseus.org/citations/urn:cts:latinLit:phi0448.phi001.perseus-eng1:6.21 6.21].</ref> -> {{sfn|Wolfram|1997|p=6}}{{efn|Caesar, ''Gallic Wars'', [http://data.perseus.org/citations/urn:cts:latinLit:phi0448.phi001.perseus-eng1:1.47 1.47], [http://data.perseus.org/citations/urn:cts:latinLit:phi0448.phi001.perseus-eng1:6.21 6.21]}} "Mixed (new) peoples". I am responsible for using this term several times, and all of those have been tagged as being unclear. Is this word really unclear in this context? Perhaps other editors can also find simpler ways around the problem. 3. (LEAD) the first long texts which have survived are written in languages of new mixed peoples[clarification needed] outside Germania: the Gothic languages from the region that is today Ukraine, and Old English in England Clarify reason: What exactly constitutes "mixed peoples"? 4. (LEAD) traditions, survived after Roman times, when new mixed peoples[clarification needed] formed new political entities in many strongly Roman-influenced parts of Europe.[clarification needed] Some of these new entities are seen as precursors of modern European nation states, such as the English and French Clarify reason: What exactly constitutes "mixed peoples" especially since the cited Goffart text claims no Germanic peoples even existed. Who was mixing with whom? NOTE: the citation given is to Heather, not Goffart, FWIW, perhaps indicating this mis-reading is one based on editor debates, not a reading which normal readers would make. 5. Ariovistus, who had been a Roman ally, and who led mixed forces Clarify reason: Mixed forces of what other groups (Romans?), Suebians and who else? NOTE: Have added information but it already appeared below in the relevant history section. Information that I think is already there, generally tags on sentences which introduce the detailed discussions which are (I think) the ones being demanded: 6. strongly Roman-influenced parts of Europe.{{clarify|date=March 2020|reason=Where in Europe?}} Some of these new entities are seen as precursors of modern European nation states, such as the English and French Adding more detail would not really seem relevant to this particular discussion in the lead? 7. Several Roman writers{{clarify|date=March 2020|reason=Which ones, there's been a large number across the ages; are we speaking of contemporaries or different authors through the ages as such accounts would influence credibility?}} followed Caesar's tradition Discussion ensues about all those authors; and a list of influenced authors had been mentioned immediately above as well in a section intro. NOTE: Have added demanded information but was that right? 8. (Modern scholars also see the central part of this area, between Elbe and Oder, as the area from which Germanic languages dispersed.){{clarify|date=March 2020|reason=Exactly which scholars are we referencing here?}} NOTE. NOTE: Have added an internal link, but was that right? There is a whole section about it below. Helping readers see links between parts of articles without getting tags like this during editor debates can be difficult for all of us. I could just add a "See below", but this is probably not best practice due to the way section names change etc. We could delete the whole sentence if it causes real consternation, but that would seem an over-reaction? If I or Obenritter find a good solution for any of these of course we should also go ahead, but I hope these types of questions are easy cases to bring in more opinions.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 08:28, 27 March 2020 (UTC) @Obenritter: please keep in mind I was hoping for "third person" opinions, for obvious reasons. For that reason and all the normal reasons that such edits are not normally recommended, I think it was not a good idea to write your responses into my post. I hope you don't mind, but I really insist on keeping my post together. Hopefully this format works for you. By the same token, as you in contrast signed each point, I will answer them individually, but if you don't like that, please change accordingly.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 15:34, 27 March 2020 (UTC) Footnote formats. Yep -- it's your taste and the citations are not consistent across the article any longer when they once were.--Obenritter (talk) 14:21, 27 March 2020 (UTC) We disagree and need some tie breakers then. I also see no problem using both "ref" and "sfn" footnotes? You are not addressing what you have against bundle footnotes. I personally do not like sentences with 10 footnotes, including 5 in the middle, or paragraphs with the same footnote 20 times. Those were typical things in old versions of this article. It is a slippery slope.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 15:34, 27 March 2020 (UTC) "Mixed (new) peoples". Yes it is unclear and you, as the author, obviously lack the objectivity to see it. What makes up mixed peoples? This needs to be stated so that the reader understands. --Obenritter (talk) 14:21, 27 March 2020 (UTC) "Mixed" and "new" are just normal English words with obvious meanings? Also, this is in the lead, and clearly explaining the details of the mixture is something for the body? The key point for the lead is that they are not pure and continuous unities.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 15:34, 27 March 2020 (UTC) 4. Roman influence and dominance across mainland Europe waxed and waned over the centuries, and some regions were under more firm control than others. There were varying degrees of domination, accommodation, and assimilation with Rome. "New mixed people" does not address which peoples are being referenced specifically and in a rewrite that has essentially rendered the Germans as questionably even existing as a group and stressing that so many different groups were interacting, this is profoundly vague.--Obenritter (talk) 14:21, 27 March 2020 (UTC) Again this is the lead, but England and France are specifically mentioned here already in the lead. We can not move all of the body into the lead. That was also a problem with past editing on this article and I think we need to learn from that. (It is also a typical problem on long articles in WP, especially when the structure is unclear. It is another slippery slope.)--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 15:34, 27 March 2020 (UTC) No misreading. The citation in the preceding sentence elucidates that >>> "Goffart (2006, Preface) NOT Heather: "Strange as it may seem to hear it said, there were no Germanic peoples in late antiquity. The illusion that there were can be outgrown." So if the Germanic peoples did not exist, who are these mixed peoples? Claiming this to be a misreading demonstrates a lack of objectivity and the failure to fully investigate the textual criticism. Pretty darn clear what that source says, but you spend more time trying to justify any and all content regardless of the counter-arguments and make the other editors here seem as though they "don't understand" something. Then you complain of ad hominem attacks when other editors evaluate content. In this case, your rebuttal (which is overtly incorrect) demonstrates your arrogance even when constructive criticism was offered. This approach and such examples illustrate how difficult collaboratively editing Wikipedia (this page in particular) is; certainly more than it should be, as any change is met by disputatious behavior. --Obenritter (talk) 14:21, 27 March 2020 (UTC) Clearly it is a misreading. You are using the source from the previous bullet (not "sentence") and no normal normal reader would do that. Honestly, your long angry posts show this is not coming from reading what is actually in the article. I do also know what the writer intended BTW.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 15:34, 27 March 2020 (UTC) 6. Again, you have failed to understand that Roman influence was not entirely uniform...and in an article that seeks to differentiate so many disparate people from across the periphery of wider Europe (Germani from one another, Scythians, etc.) using the term "mixed peoples"—no matter what is stated about later nation statehood and geography—is especially amateur and lacks clarifying depth. --Obenritter (talk) 14:21, 27 March 2020 (UTC) I disagree. You are asking for a whole new discussion in the lead. See 4. (They are connected.)--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 15:34, 27 March 2020 (UTC) 7. Of course it is necessary. Nobody expects to read an exhaustive list of these authors but mentioning two or three of the most prominent ones is in order there.--Obenritter (talk) 14:21, 27 March 2020 (UTC) But the reality is that an full and exhaustive list did already appear above and below and that was still not good enough for you. I have now added another full list here where you tagged. Seems extreme to me!--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 15:34, 27 March 2020 (UTC) 8. No need to delete this entire sentence, but at least mention two or three of the most prominent scholars. Modern scholars like XXX, XXX, and XXX see the central part of this area...--Obenritter (talk) 14:21, 27 March 2020 (UTC) There is a full section with lots of sources. Archaeology does not tend to have star papers like history, so just naming one would be purely a fudge to get around this tag. Instead I have posted an internal link to the more detailed section. I hope that is good enough. --Andrew Lancaster (talk) 15:34, 27 March 2020 (UTC) The ridiculous level of commentary about any and every proposed change or request for clarification is exhausting. Collaborating with you is too arduous and unproductive for me. If you cannot see the problems with the original text even when it has been pointed out and how confusing terms like "mixed peoples" is in this context (even after it's been explained to you), there's no way anyone can hammer it into your skull. My recommendation is for you to step away from the article for a while, as your involvement with it and attempts to lord-over the content—evidenced by the painstakingly lengthy and comprehensive comments and arguments on the Talk Page with other editors—is certainly approaching a clear violation of WP:OWN.--Obenritter (talk) 16:11, 27 March 2020 (UTC) And that post is another good demonstration of why I would like (if possible) more neutral input from others about the remaining tags, and footnote format changes. --Andrew Lancaster (talk) 17:08, 27 March 2020 (UTC) I agree with Obenritter that this article has serious issues. There are multiple violations of WP:NOR, WP:NPOV and WP:V here. The edit warring and endless discussions make it impossible for editors to do anything about it. Sooner or later, something will have be done about this. Krakkos (talk) 18:50, 27 March 2020 (UTC) Krakkos it is very possible for editors to work with me in a normal good faith way. But in constrast, your aim here is to disrupt and distract. Do you have any constructive edit proposal concerning any of the above 8 tags and changes by Obenritter? Concerning "violations", or whatever, I just note you've had some months to think of something worth putting in public, but not come up with anything. I think your editing and talk page record speaks for itself though. Try a new approach?--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 20:26, 27 March 2020 (UTC) This is clearly not a Wikipedia controversy. What we’re witnessing here is only a continuation of a scholar controversy. Some contributors are more influenced by Heather (which I admit for myself), others by Goffart (which is probably the case for Andrew). If we work together in an intelligent way, we’ll be able to propose a balanced article to the general readership, by presenting both arguments rather than trying to silence opposing arguments in the article. Azerty82 (talk) 21:01, 27 March 2020 (UTC) Please don't feed the disruptions. They are the real problem, artificially created - not the debates between the scholars. Do you have any edit proposal? --Andrew Lancaster (talk) 21:18, 27 March 2020 (UTC) TLDR @Azerty82: the way you describe this is heavily influenced by Wikipedia and similar online discussions, not the sources. I see no reason to divide the world between Heather and Goffart partisans. The real scholars do have many debates, but the ones they feel most strongly about are NOT the ones here on WP. Here on WP it is late 19th/early 20th century versus late 20th/early 21st century. People who try to report what recent sources say are called fans of Goffart. It is one big smokescreen, and THAT is the REAL problem. This field should be nowhere near as difficult to summarize as a lot of academic fields, because they are people who write a lot. Concerning Heather, have you wondered why his supposed partisans only cite his tiny dictionary articles (contrary to WP RS policy)? Have your wondered why they go around inserting cartoonish caricatures into the articles about authorities like Walter Pohl? Please let's try ONLY writing about what sources really say, not what we guess others are thinking.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 21:18, 27 March 2020 (UTC) I didn't read all arguments to be honest. People are dropping insanely long paragraphs in the discussion page, while they should rather focus their efforts on in-article contributions. I was only hoping that the academical opposition could be used in a dialectical way in order to improve the article. I maintain that it is a continuation of the same academical debate though. Critics of Heather are welcome, but Similar criticism has been leveled by Andrew Gillett, another associate of the Toronto School, who laments Heather's "biological" approach and lists Heather's research as an obstacle to the advance of multicultural values. is not a scholarly criticism for instance. The role of a historian is not to support any kind of political theory but to reach the truth. Azerty82 (talk) 21:50, 27 March 2020 (UTC) Those are fair points @Azerty82: and I have thoroughly appreciated your expertise in the field of linguistics/cultural studies to this and other articles. Andrew and I used to be on the same page about this article, but unfortunately, his approach has become generally belligerent (perhaps caused by lengthy fighting with Krakkos--not sure) to the degree that even when I found places where clarification was needed, he took offense and rejected the feedback. Imagine if I actually proceeded to edit to the article? He came to my talk page to basically inform me (a PhD historian) that I don't understand the authors, despite having been a student of Herwig Wolfram and being well-read on this subject since it tied into my dissertation subject (While I think he might know this, I am betting that he also thinks that fact makes me incapable of being entirely objective here). Things have become unnecessarily contentious and need to be returned to the actual content. He has done some admirable work here with the article, but he has deleted and replaced most of the original content in its entirety. Here at this stage, he is also ignoring actual constructive edits because he disagrees or doesn't like what was discovered. Iron sharpens iron and real scholars all know this. Nonetheless, this is causing some consternation for myself and other editors because he has taken the generic subject into an arena that deals less with the general idea of Germanic peoples and endeavored to bring it into its most controversial arena with enough granularity that it might actually be better suited to its own Wikipedia page. Some of this stems from the fact that drive-by editors were trying to insert content into the Germanic peoples page (if you'll recall) about the continuity of modern Germanic peoples, which accorded the 19th and early 20th century problematic areas that contributed to racialism. No matter the final outcome, the page needs to be much less hyperbolic in disposition. Nope. The real article as it stands is very far from handling that kind of debate, and it probably never can or should. It has struggled to handle much simpler and more essential and older developments. (See above controversy about "mixed people" citing Heather.) Of course you are correct that some opposing points are absolutely necessary to represent any field like this, but at the moment even mentioning ANY is a struggle. So we need this talk page focused on real editing proposals, based on the real article, and the real sources, not the dramatized reports of those. Please if you have some time, look through the real article. I certainly prefer editing than the talk page, but it is not always so easy.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 22:12, 27 March 2020 Here's where you go awry again, nobody asked you to delete the content, but to clarify who those "mixed people" were. This article talks about far too many different groups to leave that subject vague. You create more drama by your intransigence than anything else. My edits were an objective attempt to start dealing with areas where I see weaknesses in the content, but you really just want somebody to simply "agree" with you. Clarify who mixed peoples were--period. We can start dealing with (when we [editors] all have the time) recasting—with less inflammatory language—the general arguments in a collective sense. Stop being so quick to dig your heels in on the small stuff first, and then we can move forward.--Obenritter (talk) 23:46, 27 March 2020 (UTC) (UTC) @Obenritter: I have honestly been trying to address your tags, but your unconstructive responses would have to make anyone wonder whether all your tagging and footnote reformatting was really just directed at me personally and not making the article better. I think you overlook your recent obsession with me rather generously. Let's not forget your "Agenda anyone" post and your "your parents failed" remark.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 08:06, 28 March 2020 (UTC)

UPDATE. @Obenritter: I wish I could have created a better talk page discussion (blame me if you want) but in any case I have now made an effort to address every tag in that large round. (Obviously there were many more than the 8 topics, which I did not bring to talk because it was clear what was needed.)

• Please do keep in mind that I feel strongly, for logical reasons, that we should not overload the lead, and this influences my editing judgement as well. We don't want to evolve back to a situation where everyone pushes things into the lead, and the lead has more than the body on many topics.
• For now I left the footnotes more-or-less as you changed them except for converting the new efn for practical reasons which seem uncontroversial (see edsum).
• I have begun to work on improving the sources in the medieval section, prioritized based on what I guess might be most controversial or non-obvious, but if there is anything specific it might eventually become useful to switch from a section tag to more detailed tags or even, dare I suggest it, the talk page! :) --Andrew Lancaster (talk) 08:41, 28 March 2020 (UTC)

Every one of the 8 items now addressed, I will collapse the above detailed listing of them, taking note of concerns raised about long posts on the talk page.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 10:24, 28 March 2020 (UTC)

Thanks @Andrew Lancaster:...while there are places where I wish the original parts of the text were left alone, most of what you're attempting to do here is making more and more sense to me. You're right about tagging too, but I was concerned about coming to the Talk page to discuss as opposed to just tagging it for fear of a drawn-out argument. You do have great debate skills BTW. I hope you understand why I did that now. Anyway--since the COVID-19 thing has us all in lockdown, I should be able to start making tweaks here and there and I will try and be less vitriolic in my approach. Let's agree that when and if we disagree going forward, we'll take a step back and more carefully respond to the content, realizing we're trying to build an Encyclopedia to help people in the future.--Obenritter (talk) 17:07, 28 March 2020 (UTC)

Sounds great. I will do my best also. On your side, as a silly thing, please consider footnote formats? I think efn should be used rarely, but bundling can really help avoid some problems this article has had.

I want to repeat that I feel/hope I did a source-based restructuring update for future editors, but I do not at all argue that I have written anything like a "finished" version of any single part of this article. I did however put most effort into the lead and definition sections because these are parts of the article which can not defer to other "main" articles, and they cover the issues which were never clear in older versions, and this created long term problems. I think they are a real step forward with no equivalent in past versions, and based on a lot of investigation. So I have been trying to "focus" the article, based on my imperfect experience as a Wikipedian, and my true interest in this topic concerning which you surely know more than me. Something we surely will discuss more is that I shortened the history section, but I see this as a structuring step also. --Andrew Lancaster (talk) 18:41, 28 March 2020 (UTC)

Early Middle Ages

Given that much of the 6th through the 11th centuries is marginally covered by this rewrite of the Early Middle Ages section and it is not especially well-sourced, I would like to return to the original text from that section. Why that was not retained is unclear, but let's discuss what was once present. Here it is for comparison against the current version:

proposed version (end 2019?)	current version (29 March 2020)
///Early Middle Ages/// Main article: Early Middle Ages Frankish expansion from the early kingdom of Clovis I (481) to the divisions of Charlemagne's Empire (843/870). The transition of the Migration period to the Middle Ages proper took place over the course of the second half of the 1st millennium. It was marked by the Christianization of the Germanic peoples and the formation of stable kingdoms replacing the mostly tribal structures of the Migration period. Some of this stability is discernible in the fact that the Pope recognized Theodoric's reign when the Germanic conqueror entered Rome in AD 500, despite that Theodoric was a known practitioner of Arianism, a faith which the Council of Nicaea condemned in AD 325. Theodoric's Germanic subjects and administrators from the Roman Catholic Church cooperated in serving him, helping establish a codified system of laws and ordinances which facilitated the integration of the Gothic peoples into a burgeoning empire, solidifying their place as they appropriated a Roman identity of sorts. The foundations laid by the Empire enabled the successor Germanic kingdoms to maintain a familiar structure and their success can be seen as part of the lasting triumph of Rome. Anglo-Saxon and British kingdoms c. 800 In continental Europe, this Germanic evolution saw the rise of Francia in the Merovingian period under the rule of Clovis I who had deposed the last emperor of Gaul, eclipsing lesser kingdoms such as Alemannia. The Merovingians controlled most of Gaul under Clovis, who, through conversion to Christianity, allied himself with the Gallo-Romans. While the Merovingians were checked by the armies of the Ostrogoth Theodoric, they remained the most powerful kingdom in Western Europe and the intermixing of their people with the Romans through marriage rendered the Frankish people less a Germanic tribe and more a "European people" in a manner of speaking. Most of Gaul was under Merovingian control as was part of Italy and their overlordship extended into Germany where they reigned over the Thuringians, Alamans, and Bavarians. Evidence also exists that they may have even had suzerainty over south-east England. Frankish historian Gregory of Tours relates that Clovis converted to Christianity partly as a result of his wife's urging and even more so - due to having won a desperate battle after calling out to Christ. According to Gregory, this conversion was sincere but it also proved politically expedient as Clovis used his new faith as a means to consolidate his political power by Christianizing his army. Against Germanic tradition, each of the four sons of Clovis attempted to secure power in different cities but their inability to prove themselves on the battlefield and intrigue against one another led the Visigoths back to electing their leadership. When Merovingian rule eventually weakened, they were supplanted by another powerful Frankish family, the Carolingians, a dynastic order which produced Charles Martel, and Charlemagne. The coronation of Charlemagne as emperor by Pope Leo III in Rome on Christmas Day, AD 800 represented a shift in the power structure from the south to the north. Frankish power ultimately laid the foundations for the modern nations of Germany and France. For historians, Charlemagne's appearance in the historical chronicle of Europe also marks a transition where the voice of the north appears in its own vernacular thanks to the spread of Christianity, after which the northerners began writing in Latin, Germanic, and Celtic; whereas before, the Germanic people were only known through Roman or Greek sources. In England, the Germanic Anglo-Saxon tribes reigned over the south of Great Britain from approximately 519 to the tenth century until the Wessex hegemony became the nucleus for the unification of England. Scandinavia was in the Vendel period and eventually entered the Viking Age, with expansion to Britain, Ireland and Iceland in the west and as far as Russia and Greece in the east. By AD 900 the Vikings secured for themselves a foothold on Frankish soil along the Lower Seine River valley in what is now France that became known as Normandy. Hence they became the Normans. They established the Duchy of Normandy, a territorial acquisition which provided them the opportunity to expand beyond Normandy into Anglo-Saxon England. The subsequent Norman Conquest which followed in AD 1066 wrought immense changes to life in England as their new Scandinavian masters altered their government, lordship, public holdings, culture and DNA pool permanently. The various Germanic tribal cultures began their transformation into the larger nations of later history, English, Norse and German, and in the case of Burgundy, Lombardy and Normandy blending into a Romano-Germanic culture. Many of these later nation states started originally as "client buffer states" for the Roman Empire so as to protect it from its enemies further away. Eventually they carved out their own unique historical paths.	///Early Middle Ages/// Main article: Early Middle Ages Frankish expansion from the early kingdom of Clovis I (481) to the divisions of Charlemagne's Empire (843/870) Map showing area of Norse settlements during the Viking Age, including Norman conquests In the early Middle Ages, much of continental catholic Europe became part of a greater Francia under the Merovingian and then the Carolingian dynasty. The coronation of Charlemagne as emperor by Pope Leo III in Rome on Christmas Day, 800 CE consolidated a shift in the power structure from the south to the north, and was also a strong symbolic link to Rome and the Roman Christianity. The core of the new empire included what is now France, Germany and the Benelux countries. The empire laid the foundations for the medieval and early modern ancien regime, finally destroyed only by the French Revolution. The Frankish-Catholic way of doing politics and war and religion also had a strong effect upon all neighbouring regions, including what became England, Spain, Italy, Austria, and Bohemia. The effect of old Germanic culture on this new Latin-using empire is a topic of dispute, because there was much continuity with the old Roman legal systems, and the increasingly important Christian religion. An example which is argued to show an influence of earlier Germanic culture is law. The new kingdoms created new law codes in Latin, with occasional Germanic words. These were Roman-influenced, and under strong church influence all law was increasingly standardized to accord with Christian philosophy, and old Roman law. Germanic languages in western Europe also faded out of use in most areas apart from the West Germanic group of related languages including England, the "Austrasian" Frankish homelands near the Lower Rhine, Maas and Scheldt rivers, and the large area between the Rhine and Elbe. With the splitting off of this latter area within the Frankish empire, the first ever political entity corresponding loosely to modern "Germany" came into existence. In Eastern Europe the once relatively developed periphery of the Roman world collapsed culturally and economically, and this can be seen in the Germanic-associated archaeological evidence: in the area of today's southern Poland and Ukraine the collapse was not long after 400, and by 700 Germanic material culture was entirely west of the Elbe in the area where the Romans had been active since Caesar's time, and the Franks were now active. East of the Elbe was to become mainly Slavic speaking. Outside of the Roman-influenced zone, Germanic-speaking Scandinavia was in the Vendel period and eventually entered the Viking Age, with expansion to Britain, Ireland and Iceland in the west and as far as Russia and Greece in the east. Swedish Vikings, known locally as the Rus', ventured deep into Russia, where they founded the political entities of Kievan Rus'. They defeated the Khazar Khaganate and became the dominant power in Eastern Europe. The dominant language of these communities came to be East Slavic. By 900 CE the Vikings also secured a foothold on Frankish soil along the Lower Seine River valley in what became known as Normandy. On the other hand, the Scandinavian countries were, starting with Denmark, under the influence of Germany to their south, and also the lands where they had colonies. Bit by bit they became Christian, and organized themselves into Frankish- and Catholic-influenced kingdoms. Kingdom of Germany (Regnum Teutonicum) within the Holy Roman Empire, circa 1000 AD
References

Obviously there will be citation errors in this version, which we can correct once we move back to the original in the actual article. Nonetheless, the current version glosses over several centuries a little too much for my taste. Other editors, please provide some input after you've compared it to the new text. --Obenritter (talk) 18:06, 28 March 2020 (UTC)

OK, but the main concern is pretty simple and that is length. This is of course much longer. We have another article which you and I could also go and work on, and the Germanic aspect of this period is peripheral to Germanic peoples in their "core" sense? Which bits are most critical for "the Germanic"?

BTW feel free to uncollapse. I am feeling paranoid about people blaming me for the talk page being too full. Apologies in advance if required.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 18:41, 28 March 2020 (UTC)

Good move to hide it that way Andrew. Actually, I wanted to also consider removing the sections "Roman descriptions of early Germanic people and culture" and the "Genetics" sections altogether. It seems that Roman descriptions are more than sufficiently covered throughout the rest of the article and the Genetics issue has only caused controversy. If we forego keeping those sections, the older version of the early Middle Ages doesn't burden the article as much and stops it where this should probably end, that is, if you concur. --Obenritter (talk) 19:03, 28 March 2020 (UTC)

I have adapted that collapsed section to show your proposal compared to the current version. I would say that "methodologically" we should consider the merits of each section independently:

• Yes, Genetics in general is difficult on Wikipedia, because the field is so new and fast moving, and our editors are mainly citing individual research papers where the only historical remarks are being made by non-historians. However, I've worked a lot on such problems, and these section keep coming back (and if we are lucky, one day someone will actually publish something relevant). The the least worst option is probably to have a place for it. The section as it stands is now just a short place-holder, and stripped down to a pretty simple few remarks.
• The classical descriptions could perhaps be removed. However perhaps a short "placeholder" version of this section should remain because this is now our main "cultural" section (unless we count the . And it helps readers get to our still nascent "Early Germanic culture" article. (Also keep in mind that Azerty82 is working on something which may replace this? Or maybe Azerty has another approach. Perhaps Azerty can comment.)
• Early Middle Ages. Looking now in the above comparison table I am not sure a simple replacement back to an old version is the best approach. The old version mixed in events from pre-medieval history. (e.g. Theoderic and Clovis, kingdoms, conversions, clients are for previous sections.) 2ndly the new version (which you can see is based quite a lot on the old version) was not just trying to focus more on the article topic, but also involved an effort to add missing topics which we would now simply delete. The old one also did need tweaking. (I do hope we can keep being more careful about things like "The Vikings became Normans". Was 1066 really anything to do with "Germanic peoples" and "DNA"? I am cautious of terms like "tribes" and "nation states". Was there a "large" "Norse" "nation" formed in this period? Was the inheritance of Clovis definitely a "Germanic" thing?) So I am thinking normal bit-by-bit editing would be better than a simple massive revert?--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 08:07, 29 March 2020 (UTC)

Theodoric and Clovis are not considered "pre-medieval" by most historians, as the typical cut-off line for late antiquity/early medieval is normally 400 AD (some start as early as 300). Both lived after that date. These "Germanic" kings were very important for Europe's general political development. Theodoric for his integration of Roman-style administration into the developing polities that he controlled; Clovis for moving the Franks away from Arianism and to Catholicism. These are especially important in my opinion. Moving so quickly all the way to the 9th century arrival of Charlemagne onto the scene is otherwise jarring and omits significant historical events. You're right, we can dispense with the "Hence they became the Normans" sentence, which only muddies things, but otherwise, most of what was originally there provides a clearer framework regarding the continuity of Europe's emerging formation.--Obenritter (talk) 15:09, 29 March 2020 (UTC)

Maybe there is a misunderstanding. Concerning Clovis, Theoderic and the Lombard invasion, for example, no one is arguing against including them. They are in another section. I think the breakpoint currently used between the sections (about 500-568) is the most common one in our sources. Old versions of the article provide no alternative structure, and they had extensive duplication. Creating a stricter chronological structure for the first time seems to have resulted in the biggest difference in this section we are looking at. ...So in practice, a major part of your revert proposal would be a proposal to start duplicating material or destructuring the article without even first looking at whether the the current structure is reasonable. Do you understand my concern?

So if we are talking chronology and the importance of the these figures, how is it that you've essentially skipped all the way to Charlemagne from the 6th century? The mentions of both Clovis and Theodoric are cursory at best in the article and such minimal treatment given to two of the most important Germanic chieftains in the history of Europe is a tad dismissive. The rewrite is decidedly inferior on this point.--Obenritter (talk) 21:42, 29 March 2020 (UTC)

Concerning the examples of smaller problems, there are many more details we could discuss which explain small differences and re-arrangements. However, to be practical, I think the first question is why you can't just make step-by-step edits of the existing version, rather than making a massive revert. To say the least, I honestly do not think the old version is "self-evidently" better. I think the various small changes, and of course the large change caused by the new chronological sectioning, deserve to be considered carefully. There was some thought put into this.

There was lots of thought put into the original text on the transition out of the Migration period into the Early Middle Ages, most of which was magically deleted or turned into executive summary via omission, so I'd like to know how you've come to the conclusion that the previous content was to be somehow superseded via synopsis. What exact line of reasoning was used? In some places, sourced content was retained but the source was deleted altogether and added to a list of "unused sources" in the talk page. What was especially constructive and thoughtful about those changes? Important things are missing that better explain the evolution of Europe and are not found elsewhere in this article, so returning that content is not unreasonable.--Obenritter (talk) 21:42, 29 March 2020 (UTC)

Honestly I think this is also the normal WP way of working and quite a reasonable proposal?--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 16:00, 29 March 2020 (UTC)

Given the massive deletion/rewrite of this article, let this be viewed as retroactive content negotiations that did not occur earlier as many of us have busy lives outside of WP. In other words, this current engagement represents the collaboration that did not happen when this section was originally rewritten.--Obenritter (talk) 21:42, 29 March 2020 (UTC)

ADDED, I guess the TLDR is that I suggest "not rushing" on this particular point, because I know it would involve more concerns than is immediately obvious.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 17:34, 29 March 2020 (UTC)

You're right, there's no need to rush this.

Well then, I believe the normal practice would be to now start a discussion naming one of the specific things which is now worse or missing, rather than just saying it used to be better as a general remark. (I think we should both accept that both versions had their own rationales, but in practice the current one is the one which has been fitted to the current structure. I am obviously concerned about keeping a chronological structure in order to avoid the slippery slope of duplications. Otherwise this section is not shockingly different to the old version.)

As an example, of trying to understand you on a concrete detail: I couldn't really understand your point about the section break being "jarring" in this case, because (1) In context it sounds like you are saying we need to duplicate material in every section again in order to avoid being jarring? Or maybe we should have less section breaks? And (2) why would separating events 300 years apart be controversial, and why would separating Theoderic's time from Odoacer's time be uncontroversial? But obviously I must just be misunderstanding you...

...That is why it might be better to look at details, bit by bit. Where to put the sections breaks is obviously one possible thing that we can change too. But then we should look at the preceding section too. --Andrew Lancaster (talk) 22:16, 29 March 2020 (UTC)

BTW I do not know which version of this article you are treating as the good one, but if I look for example at 23 December [6] then discussion of Theoderic is split (jarringly?) between several sections. The most relevant for this discussion are Early Middle Ages and Fall of the Western Roman Empire.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 22:44, 29 March 2020 (UTC)

A few missing things for consideration:

• Skipping 300 years is pretty important since during those years, two of the most important Germanic chieftains lived (who are barely mentioned elsewhere in the text). One of whom (Theodoric) did more to help usher in Roman style administration over the Germanic peoples through a subsequent codification of laws, changing many of their tribal customs and practices into those closer resembling Roman ones, more so than perhaps all of his predecessors.
• Meanwhile, (Clovis), influenced history by advocating (if not forcing) Christian conversion from Arianism to Catholicism for his subjects. This development helped facilitate more contact and mixing with other Catholic peoples and more of European identity. Since the Franks controlled most of Gaul, parts of Italy, some of what would become Germany, even part of England, and some of France, this is significant.
• Frankish suzerainty was maintained for for several generations from Merovingian through Carolingian, passing through Charles Martel and later to Charlemagne; a continuity that afforded the Germanic Franks a central place in Europe's historical development. The current text glosses over all of that and leaps straight to Charlemagne, as if the average reader would understand that continuity. I think not, hence the previous explanatory text.

--Obenritter (talk) 23:11, 29 March 2020 (UTC)

• I see the relevance of the Romanitas of Theoderic's administration, and the religious conversions. They were not totally removed, but maybe they should go a bit further. OTOH, I really think we can say the important things in fewer words. I will have a first try to work on it. (I am awake now, and I guess you aren't.)
• Apart from wordiness and structure, there was a repeating issue on old versions of this article with how we need to deal with consensus versus non-consensus on WP. Often the discussion was, quite wrongly, about which scholar's side to pick. (I am not blaming you personally. We all probably played a role.) Actually, if we know one scholar's position is contested, then we need to avoid implying that it is the only position, unless we are prepared to present a bigger comparison of several positions. So for example for the conversion of Clovis we should mention its importance, but I think it is not worth going into debates about the exact course of events in this article. Hope that makes sense. I am going to try to follow that principle more strictly.
• There was no removal of material about the 300 years between Clovis and Charlemagne. We just have a more clear section break. You mention Charles Martel but he is just listed as a member of the Carolingian dynasty. I will try to match that.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 07:36, 30 March 2020 (UTC)

FWIW the section and a half which covered the period roughly 400-700 was more than 2000 words on 23 Dec 2019, and it covered far fewer big topics than the new version, which is about 1000 words (half). Missing, for example: the Lombard kingdom, the Burgundians, the Vandals, etc. Topics from other periods ARE included, like the Bastarnae. The style of the older version was a narrative or story-telling style which uses a lot of space, but does not explain to readers which things are a consensus and which not. It also was not systematic, which is why some subjects become big digressions, but very many are left out. Here is a comparison, which can hopefully help guide discussion and further editing. To me this comparison shows strikingly why we need to work bit by bit, always working from the latest version that many editors have helped copy-edit over the last months:

Version 23 Dec 2019	Version 30 Mar 2020
///Fall of the Western Roman Empire/// Further information: Decline of the Western Roman Empire and Barbarian kingdoms Germanic kingdoms and tribes after the end of the Western Roman Empire in 476 CE Some of the Germanic tribes are frequently credited in popular depictions of the decline of the Roman Empire in the 5th century. Many historians and archaeologists have since the 1950s shifted their interpretations in such a way that the Germanic peoples are no longer seen as invading a decaying empire but as being co-opted into helping defend territory the central government could no longer adequately administer. When the Roman Empire refused to allow the Visigoths to settle in Noricum for instance, they responded by sacking Rome in CE 410 under the leadership of Alaric I. Oddly enough, Alaric I did not see his imposition in Rome as an attack against the Roman Empire per se but as an attempt to gain a favorable position within its borders, particularly since the Visigoths held the Empire in high regard. Alaric certainly had no intentions to destroy the great city which was symbolic of Roman power, but he needed to pay his army and the spoils of the city not only afforded the ability to do that, its wealth made him "the richest general in the empire." For the next year, Alaric extracted vast sums from the city; this included 5,000 pounds of gold, 30,000 pounds of silver, 5,000 pounds of oriental pepper, gilded statues from the Forum, and even the one-ton solid silver dome which Constantine once placed over the baptismal basin next to the Lateran basilica. Not only was Alaric able to bleed Rome, he also established a Gothic confederation consisting of Theruingian and Greuthungic peoples, and he played the eastern and western Roman Empires off against one another for his benefit. While Germanic tribes overran the once western Roman provinces, they also continued to strive for regional ascendancy closer to Rome's center; meanwhile the threat along the periphery from the Huns created additional difficulties for the Empire. Sometime during the 4th or 5th century CE, the Bastarnae were defeated by the Huns, ending their regional domination. Coin of Odoacer, Ravenna, 477, with Odoacer in profile, depicted with a "barbarian" moustache. Individuals and small groups from Germanic tribes had long been recruited from the territories beyond the limes (i.e., the regions just outside the Roman Empire), and some of them had risen high in the command structure of the army. The Rhine and Danube provided the bulk of geographic separation for the Roman limes. On one side of the limes stood 'Latin' Europe, law, Roman order, prosperous trading markets, towns and everything that constituted modern civilization for that era; while on the other side stood barbarism, technical backwardness, illiteracy and a tribal society of fierce warriors. Then the Empire recruited entire tribal groups under their native leaders as military officers. Historian Evangelos Chrysos argues the implications concerning the recruitment of the barbarians into the Roman army during the migration period were enormous and relates that: it offered them experience of how the imperial army was organized, how the government arranged the military and functional logistics of their involvement as soldiers or officers and how it administered their practical life, how the professional expertise and the social values of the individual soldier were cultivated in the camp and on the battlefield, how the ideas about the state and its objectives were to be implemented by men in uniform, how the Empire was composed and how it functioned at an administrative level. This knowledge of and experience with the Romans opened to individual members of the gentes a path which, once taken, would lead them to more or less substantial affiliation or even solidarity with the Roman world. To take an example from the economic sphere: The service in the Roman army introduced the individual or corporate members into the monetary system of the Empire since quite a substantial part of their salary was paid to them in cash. With money in their hands the "guests" were by necessity exposed to the possibility of taking part in the economic system, of becoming accustomed to the rules of the wide market, of absorbing the messages of or reacting to the imperial propaganda passed to the citizens through the legends on the coins. In addition the goods offered in the markets influenced and transformed the newcomers' food and aesthetic tastes and their cultural horizon. Furthermore Roman civilitas was an attractive goal for every individual wishing to succeed in his social advancement. Assisting with defense eventually shifted into administration and then outright rule, as Roman government passed into the hands of Germanic leaders. Odoacer (who commanded the German mercenaries in Italy) deposed Romulus Augustulus, the last emperor of the West in CE 476. Odoacer ruled from Rome and Ravenna, restored the Colosseum and assigned seats to senatorial dignitaries as part of the process of consolidating his rule. The presence of successor states controlled by a nobility from one of the Germanic tribes is evident in the 6th century – even in Italy, the former heart of the Empire, where Odoacer was followed by Theodoric the Great, king of the Ostrogoths, who was regarded by Roman citizens and Gothic settlers alike as legitimate successor to the rule of Rome and Italy. Theodoric ruled from CE 493–526, twice as long as his predecessor, and his rule is evidenced by an abundance of documents. Under the Ostrogoths a considerable degree of Roman and Germanic cultural and political fusion was achieved. Germanic kings worked in-tandem with Roman administrators to the extent possible to help ensure a smooth transition and to facilitate the profitable administration of once Roman lands. Slowly but surely, the distinction between Germanic rulers and Roman subjects faded, followed by varying degrees of "cultural assimilation" which included the adoption of the Gothic language by some of the indigenous people of the former Roman Empire but this was certainly not ubiquitous as Gothic identity still remained distinctive. Theodoric may have tried too hard to accommodate the various people under his dominion; indulging "Romans and Goths, Catholics and Arians, Latin and barbarian culture" resulted in the eventual failure of the Ostrogothic reign and the subsequent "end of Italy as the heartland of late antiquity." Germanic kingdoms in 526 CE According to noted historian Herwig Wolfram, the Germanic peoples did not and could not "conquer the more advanced Roman world" nor were they able to "restore it as a political and economic entity"; instead, he asserts that the empire's "universalism" was replaced by "tribal particularism" which gave way to "regional patriotism". The Germanic peoples who overran the Western Roman Empire probably numbered less than 100,000 people per tribe, including approximately 15,000-20,000 warriors. They constituted a tiny minority of the population in the lands over which they seized control. Among these tribes, the Ostrogoths in Italy and the Visigoths in Spain are recorded to have enacted laws against intermarriage in order to preserve their identity. The entry of the Germanic tribes deep into the heart of Europe and the subsequent collapse of the western Roman Empire resulted in a "massive disruption" to long established communication networks, a system that had in many ways "bound much of the continent together for centuries." Trade networks and routes shifted accordingly, Germanic kingdoms and peoples established boundaries and it was not until the appearance of the Arabs in Iberia and into Anatolia that Europeans began reestablishing their networks to deal with a new threat. ///Early Middle Ages/// Main article: Early Middle Ages Frankish expansion from the early kingdom of Clovis I (481) to the divisions of Charlemagne's Empire (843/870) The transition of the Migration period to the Middle Ages proper took place over the course of the second half of the 1st millennium. It was marked by the Christianization of the Germanic peoples and the formation of stable kingdoms replacing the mostly tribal structures of the Migration period. Some of this stability is discernible in the fact that the Pope recognized Theodoric's reign when the Germanic conqueror entered Rome in CE 500, despite that Theodoric was a known practitioner of Arianism, a faith which the First Council of Nicaea condemned in CE 325. Theodoric's Germanic subjects and administrators from the Roman Catholic Church cooperated in serving him, helping establish a codified system of laws and ordinances which facilitated the integration of the Gothic peoples into a burgeoning empire, solidifying their place as they appropriated a Roman identity of sorts. The foundations laid by the Empire enabled the successor Germanic kingdoms to maintain a familiar structure and their success can be seen as part of the lasting triumph of Rome. Anglo-Saxon and British kingdoms c. 800 In continental Europe, this Germanic evolution saw the rise of Francia in the Merovingian period under the rule of Clovis I who had deposed the last emperor of Gaul, eclipsing lesser kingdoms such as Alemannia. The Merovingians controlled most of Gaul under Clovis, who, through conversion to Christianity, allied himself with the Gallo-Romans. While the Merovingians were checked by the armies of the Ostrogoth Theodoric, they remained the most powerful kingdom in Western Europe and the intermixing of their people with the Romans through marriage rendered the Frankish people less a Germanic tribe and more a "European people" in a manner of speaking. Most of Gaul was under Merovingian control as was part of Italy and their overlordship extended into Germany where they reigned over the Thuringians, Alamans, and Bavarians. Evidence also exists that they may have even had suzerainty over south-east England. Frankish historian Gregory of Tours relates that Clovis converted to Christianity partly as a result of his wife's urging and even more so due to having won a desperate battle after calling out to Christ. According to Gregory, this conversion was sincere but it also proved politically expedient as Clovis used his new faith as a means to consolidate his political power by Christianizing his army. Against Germanic tradition, each of the four sons of Clovis attempted to secure power in different cities but their inability to prove themselves on the battlefield and intrigue against one another led the Visigoths back to electing their leadership.	///5th century. The western empire divided into kingdoms/// Further information: Decline of the Western Roman Empire and Barbarian kingdoms Germanic kingdoms and tribes after the end of the Western Roman Empire in 476 CE Coin of Odoacer, Ravenna, 477, with Odoacer in profile, depicted with a "barbarian" moustache. Germanic kingdoms in 526 CE 2nd century to 6th century simplified migrations In the 420s, Flavius Aëtius was a general who successfully used Hunnish forces on several occasions, fighting Roman factions, and various barbarians including Goths and Franks. In 429 he was elevated to the rank of magister militum in the western empire, putting him in control of much of its policy. One of his first conflicts was with Boniface, a rebellious governor of the province of Africa in modern Tunisia and Libya. Both sides sought an alliance with the Vandals based in southern Spain who had acquired a fleet there. In this context, the Vandal and Alan kingdom of North Africa and the western Mediterranean would come into being. In 433 Aëtius was in exile and spent time in the Hunnish domain. In 434, the Vandals were granted the control of some parts of northwest Africa, but Aëtius defeated Boniface using Hunnish forces. In 436 Aëtius defeated the Burgundians on the Rhine with the help of Hunnish forces. In 439 the Vandals and their allies captured Carthage. The Romans made a new agreement recognizing the Visigothic kingdom. In 440, the Hunnish "empire" as it can now be called, under Attila and his brother Bleda began a series of attacks over the Danube into the eastern empire, and Danubian part of the western empire. They received enormous payments from the eastern empire and then focused their attentions to the west, where they were already familiar with the situation, and in friendly contact with the African Vandals. In 442 Aëtius seems to have granted the Alans who had remained in Gaul a kingdom, apparently including Orléans, possibly to counter local independent Roman groups (so called Bagaudae, who also competed for power in Iberia). In 443 Aëtius settled the Burgundians from the Rhine deeper in the empire, in Savoy in Gaul. In 451, the large mixed force of Attila crossed the Rhine but was defeated by Aetius with forces from the settled barbarians in Gaul - Visigoths, Franks, Burgundians and Alans. In 452 Attila attacked Italy, but had to retreat to the Middle Danube because of disease. In 453, Aëtius and Attila both died. In 454, the Hunnish alliance divided and fought the Battle of Nedao. The original names of the peoples in the alliance appear again. Several of them were allowed to become federates of the eastern empire in the Balkans, and others created kingdoms in the Middle Danube. In the subsequent decades, the Franks and Alamanni tended to remain in small kingdoms but these began to extend deeper into the empire. In northern Gaul, a Roman military "King of Franks" also seems to have existed, Childeric I, whose successor Clovis I established dominance of the smaller kingdoms of the Franks and Alamanni, who they defeated at the Battle of Zülpich in 496. According to Guy Halsall, a similar process to this may have occurred in Southern Britain, which was similarly isolated, though Romanized, and left to defend look after itself. The lowland fertile areas which would become England were also inhabited by a mixture of Romanized people and military forces, including many from northern Germany, who retained an ethnic distinctiveness typical within late Roman units. Unlike Northern Gaul it is often assumed that many small English kingdoms subsequently formed, and only gradually merged into larger units. However, as pointed out by Halsall, this "FA Cup Model", is only an hypothesis, and not evidence-based. In 476 Odoacer, a Roman soldier who came from the tribes of the Middle Danube in the aftermath of Nedao, became King of Italy, removing the last western emperors from power. He was replaced in 493 by Theoderic the Great, described as King of the Ostrogoths, one of the most powerful Middle Danube people of the old Hun alliance, and raised up and supported by the eastern emperors. His large Ostrogothic kingdom was ended only in 542 when the eastern emperor Justinian made a last great effort to reconquer the western mediterranean. The empire was unable to hold Italy for long, and in 568 the Lombard king Alboin, a Suebian people who had entered the Middle Danubian region from the north, entered Italy and created the Italian Kingdom of the Lombards there. These Lombards now included Suevi, Heruli, Gepids, Bavarians, Bulgars, Avars, Saxons, Goths, and Thuringians. As Peter Heather has written these "peoples" were no longer peoples in any traditional sense. Older accounts which describe a long period of massive movements of peoples and military invasions are over-simplified, and only describe specific incidents. According to Herwig Wolfram, the Germanic peoples did not and could not "conquer the more advanced Roman world" nor were they able to "restore it as a political and economic entity"; instead, he asserts that the empire's "universalism" was replaced by "tribal particularism" which gave way to "regional patriotism". The Germanic peoples who overran the Western Roman Empire probably numbered less than 100,000 people per tribe, including approximately 15,000-20,000 warriors. They constituted a tiny minority of the population in the lands over which they seized control. Apart from the common history many of them had in the Roman military, and on Roman frontiers, a new and longer-term unifying factor for the new kingdoms was that by 500, the start of the Middle Ages, most of the old Western empire had converted to the same Rome-based Catholic form of Christianity.
References

Obenritter I have been working on Theodoric and Clovis, Romanitas and Arianism, etc. I also reduced discussion of England given the consensus that actually it is hard to know what happened in detail. The relevant section is now called 5th and 6th centuries. The western empire divided into kingdoms. That title maybe need to be shortened, but I leave it there for discussion. Some ideas:

• "5th and 6th centuries"
• "5th and 6th century kingdom formation"
• "From Roman emperors to Barbarian kings (420-568)"

While that drafting is certainly not finished, I will see what feedback it gets and next I will consider that gap from 568-800. (A gap which existed in all past versions I think.) I am thinking there was not enough to deserve a full section, so will try to fit smaller references into the Early Middle ages.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 09:58, 30 March 2020 (UTC)

Latest section title attempt: From Western empire to medieval kingdoms (420-568). And Charles Martel is now added. I have not added many sources, while I wait for feedback or edits by others, so everyone please feel free to point to anything most urgently needing a source. (I don't believe in automatically adding as many sources as possible. And here we are dealing with sections that summarize matters detailed in other articles.) BTW I personally would also be quite open to the idea of discussing re-shortening these history sections also if concerns are building. Undoubtedly it is healthy to have some back and forth about exactly what events were important to understanding Germanic peoples.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 10:33, 30 March 2020 (UTC)

It looks like you have a handle on this and understand my concerns. Not sure if I am helping or hurting the developmental process, so I will step away as real life takes precedence. --Obenritter (talk) 10:39, 30 March 2020 (UTC)

That puts a weight on me! :) I will keep trying. I hope others can give input too.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 11:04, 30 March 2020 (UTC)

Early Germanic drafting

Hi Andrew Lancaster, I'm still working on my draft on the Origin of Albanians, but I'll soon propose a new section for the Proto-Germanic period (i.e., pre-Roman). As I said in another discussion page, I'm not fond of the denomination "Early Germanic" as it unclear which period it is referring to: either we use 'proto-Germanic' as linguists do, or 'pre-historic period' like historians and archeologists. To keep this section short, I won't be using the approach I traditionally introduce in articles I've been restructuring (separating linguistic, material, genetic and historical evidence). I will rather write a synthesis of what is attested about the pre-Roman period, and of what has been securely reconstructed based on a cross-examination of those different scientific fields. Azerty82 (talk) 09:31, 29 March 2020 (UTC)

I agree about being careful of unclear terms like "early". I have doubts about "proto-Germanic" because it is not only linguistic, but also "abstract" in a sense. (Maybe I'm wrong.) Concerning duplication, arguably the article already has a duplication problem for the earliest evidence, but maybe a new section can help us reduce some other sections. Archaeology for example is currently discussed under the definition discussions (my fault!), in the language section and in the prehistoric section which already exists. (It could potentially also be discussed in the 4th-3rd centuries BCE section.) You should look at those sections I guess.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 10:14, 29 March 2020 (UTC)

Proto-Germanic wouldn't be indeed fully appropriate, as it describes the state of a language before its earliest direct attestation. "Prehistoric period" is, I think, the best denomination. This is the one currently used in the article. My idea was not to create a new section, but rather to rewrite the history>prehistory section. A more global restructuration could lead to a new section called 'culture', and featuring sub-sections the likes of 'languages', 'religion', etc. Again, the difficulty is separating the different periods of history from the 'common' Germanic culture up until the final disintegration during the Migration Period. By 'common', I'm not referring to a romanticized 'Urkultur', but to a period where beliefs and dialects were still very closed to each other. Stay tuned, Azerty82 (talk) 16:34, 29 March 2020 (UTC)

All sounds reasonable.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 17:34, 29 March 2020 (UTC)

Azerty82 I just realized we kind of lost the original question which is what do you think about this section? It is being proposed that we should remove it. Given that it is currently the linking section to Early Germanic culture, your thoughts on this seem relevant.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 07:36, 30 March 2020 (UTC)

Yes you can remove it. It's almost entirely based on old scholarship (Owen, 1960) an primary sources alone (Tacitus, Caesar). I'll use more recent commentaries of Roman writers for the section. Btw, could you all use the function 'edition' in 'cite book' instead of 'year' or 'date' for ancient writers? It is quite surprising to read things like "Caesar, Julius (2019)" ;-) Azerty82 (talk) 08:02, 30 March 2020 (UTC)

That is indeed a good point about those templates which I have mentioned before also! I hope you do not mind keeping links to the Perseus project texts as well though on those primary sources, because I guess I am not the only person who like to have them. Concerning the section in question, is there any other section where we can put a section link to Early Germanic culture?--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 11:08, 30 March 2020 (UTC)

I agree with Obenritter about removing the sections "Roman descriptions of early Germanic people and culture" and the "Genetics" sections altogether, and for the same reasons. Srnec (talk) 16:53, 29 March 2020 (UTC)

Well just to be clear, I don't feel any strong attachment to either. I've given some reasons to be cautious above, and also suggested an option of keeping a short "culture" section somehow in order to maintain a link to Early Germanic culture. But these are all just my typical cautionary style of thinking through what can go wrong.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 17:34, 29 March 2020 (UTC)

An article to define the scope of another article?

Azerty82 you raise a point which is worth addressing on this edit: A new article Definitions of Germanic peoples should be created to reduce the size of this section. I understand you are saying this is an option we can consider if article length ever becomes a really urgent problem again. (I think we are not there just because of your edit though.) I would like to say that I doubt this will ever be a good idea, just for logical reasons. The problem is simple: it would be an article which exists only to define the core and scope of another article. Sections about Germanic languages and Germanic-speaking kings and so on are always going to be easier to split out, and most such topics already have their own articles.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 17:43, 29 March 2020 (UTC)

(edit conflict) But, BTW, some of the sections of the definitions section can probably be reduced and merged into similar sections which kind of developed in parallel. I am thinking here of bits about languages and archaeology. For the definitions section the main thing is to say that there are modern linguistic and archaeological attempts to define Germanic peoples, and point to why these have not resolved all the old questions. The practical problem is only making sure the reader can find their way between the sections when they need to.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 18:00, 29 March 2020 (UTC)

Andrew Lancaster, To clarify: this section is too long. We spend half of the article defining the scope of the article (it not an exaggeration, it really takes half of the article). That said, everything in this section is valuable. So here is my proposition: let us create a new article for readers that want to go deeper into this very subject (the definitions of Germanic peoples), and let us only keep the essential information about the definitions of Germanic peoples in this section. Azerty82 (talk) 17:47, 29 March 2020 (UTC)

(edit conflict)But think about the logic of what you are saying. I understand why all the baggage of this subject makes it difficult to see, so let me switch to another topic. Let's say on the article for Dogs, someone writes "I am not exaggerating, but almost half this article is about what dogs are and what they are like. That means less than half is about famous dog owners, religions with dog-headed gods, laws about pets, etc." And I would say "why is it less than half?" It should all be about dogs.

Putting logic aside there is also a big practical problem which has been demonstrated empirically. This topic is one people [on Wikipedia] all have different ways of defining. This has made it hard to edit and hard to read. Most articles begin by defining what they are about, and try to make it easy for readers and editors to understand what the scope is. My experience on this article is that some people interested in this topic WANT the scope to be confusing and fuzzy. Honestly this has gone for years.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 18:00, 29 March 2020 (UTC)

Well, it's just a side issue. Let's extend the rest of the article. Azerty82 (talk) 18:48, 29 March 2020 (UTC)

Sure; and by the way I think your willingness to propose something like this openly and early so we can all start thinking about it, is really good. We may end up convincing each other, or a third idea may arise, before it is urgent. Currently I think the medium term answer is to think of shortening the section by merging some parts into other sections. Keep it in mind?--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 19:37, 29 March 2020 (UTC)

As I said, my concern is not about the content itself–it is valuable and instructive–but rather about readability. We'll see in the near future how we can effectively shorten this section. Azerty82 (talk) 20:19, 29 March 2020 (UTC)

@Azerty82: Your idea is interesting to me and I would support that approach so that we can dispense with some of the granular discourse in the current article, which might be better suited to the subjects of definition/classification.

PS: see Definitions of fascism, Definition of terrorism, Definition of religion, etc. Azerty82 (talk) 17:52, 29 March 2020 (UTC)

I think any such extreme solution needs a really good justification. I am not seeing any. This topic's core should be this topic. It is not like we have a shortage of overlapping articles here, or big differences between the sources. The confusion has been artificial and WP-editor based (not like religion). Also consider WP:OSE. --Andrew Lancaster (talk) 18:00, 29 March 2020 (UTC)

Imo Azerty's proposal is a good idea lest one part of the page gets too long, but I would not have a whole page for Definitions of.... Instead we have a better model: Historiography of Germanic peoples. Definitions is far to shallow, but discussing historiography involves examining the implications and nuances of different viewpoints that existed throughout academic/political history on the matter.--Calthinus (talk) 23:44, 29 March 2020 (UTC)

... On the other hand, imagining I am a reader who knows little of the topic, I would find such a situation ... very confusing. --Calthinus (talk) 23:50, 29 March 2020 (UTC)

Devil's advocate question: how many of the concerns about the Definitions section could be fixed by renaming that section? I do not have an answer, but as a general rule if criticisms of a section focus on the name, it might be a sign of something easy to fix which we are missing.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 08:03, 30 March 2020 (UTC)

Maybe it's better to focus on modern scholarly definitions in this section and move–for instance–the romanticism part in another section. The article earth doesn't discuss creationism in the /Chronology/ section, nor does it mention obsolete theories about flat earth, ocean-surrounded earth, in /Physical characteristics/. Do you see what I mean? Azerty82

PS: Please don't link WP:OSE again, I'm just trying to use compelling examples to better communicate my concern ;-) (talk) 09:38, 30 March 2020 (UTC)

LOL. No problem. We have discussed this type of thing before and I have been looking for ideas. It still seems there should be a solution in this direction. HOWEVER, the complication is (or might be?) that, all of the latest ideas are still based on different ideas about what to accept from Caesar, Tacitus, and Jordanes. Sorry for the length, but thinking this through again might be helpful...

In fact there is no single definition today. This is not unusual for many subjects, and the normal solution is to then is build from whatever the "common ground" is, which they all build from. But when we do that, then that common ground is Caesar et al. So we can not explain the 21st century without explaining Caesar and his friends. Caesar is still relevant, not out-dated.

(I know this is not immediately obvious because for example modern linguistics (or archaeology) is objective and separable right? But actually it is not. There is almost no study possible of Germanic-speaking peoples in the time of the Roman empire, so the linguists have to trust Tacitus for that whole period. The linguists can still study the languages, but without the classical texts they can't say who spoke them. See our current efn footnote "b". Also in the history of discussions on this article whenever people mentioned the idea of a linguistic definition of Germanic peoples, discussion showed that such editors ALSO wanted language to be seen as strongly connected to biology/ancestry.)

So classical usage is still relevant for discussion of what scholars think in the 21st century. In other words: if you asked me to write a much shorter section ONLY about what people should see the definition is today, and NOT including out-of-date ideas, it is possible, but it would include some short references to the Caesarian and Tacitean descriptions.

OTOH, the "out of date" historiography section is not the classical part, but the early modern until the mid 20th century period, when various artificial certainties developed, partly by leaning heavily on Jordanes etc.

PROBLEM in practice: at least some scholars, but more to the point a large population of people on the internet, can not accept such scepticism about late 19th and early 20th century "certainties". Some people still want such things mentioned first as the 21st century mainstream. So this has led to compromises also. --Andrew Lancaster (talk) 11:45, 30 March 2020 (UTC)

I might, as an experiment, try drafting a split between "definition now" and "historiography" sections. Not sure it will work. Could end up looking like the same discussion twice?--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 12:42, 30 March 2020 (UTC)

The issue here is not the primary Roman sources (I've never proposed to remove them), but their interpretation. And the Romantic interpretation is outdated. It's interesting for the historiography, but not really for modern definitions.

So, here's my proposition (to be improved, it's just a global framework):

1. Definitions

a. definitions given by primary sources

aa. pre-Caesar

ab. Caesar

ac. Tacitus

ab. Jordanes

b. other evidence

ba. archeology

bb. linguistics

bc. (?) genetics

b. their modern interpretations

ba. Toronto school

bb. Vienna school

bc. Historical linguistics

Azerty82 (talk) 13:00, 30 March 2020 (UTC)

PS: @Andrew Lancaster: I'm wondering if it's not better to rewrite the whole article from scratch together in a draft, and only keep what is valuable from the old article. Azerty82 (talk) 13:08, 30 March 2020 (UTC)

Concerning the "proposition" it is not that different from the current structure yet? What I was thinking of now was a bit different and also based on the remark of Calthinus: can we make a short definition section, mainly about the 21st century scholarly definitions, and break the other parts out? I am not sure if ANY of these ideas would really be good. (Small things: (1) Jordanes is not classical and does not directly say much new about Germani. For him the Goths are Scythians. He is important for the early modern synthesis, because he helped them connect Goths to Germania as defined by Tacitus and Ptolemy. He is also the source of the idea of Scandinavia as a womb of nations. (2) Genetics. Have not seen anything yet for the correct cultures. I see the current section as a placeholder for the future (3) You have two section "b"s.:) I guess it is your second "b" which might be seen as ambitious here, but it is logical to even make it first.)

Concerning drafting, we can always keep trying things. I am open to ideas, but it might also be better to look at specific section ideas. Or we can try ALL these, AND we can also just try tweaking sections as usual. My biggest advice on this: we can not rush on big changes, and we do need to keep trying to think about the different opinions out there.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 13:35, 30 March 2020 (UTC)

It is different. Not that different, but different anyway (I don't want to scare fellow contributors with radical changes). I've never said Jordanes was a Classical author. He is one of the main primary sources. Alternative proposition: only keep modern definitions.

a. Toronto school

b. Vienna school

c. Historical linguistics Azerty82 (talk) 15:20, 30 March 2020 (UTC)

OK, let's develop ideas. Even if we decide the current structure does NOT need changing it is healthy to try other approaches. I am sure I will once again be blamed for filling this talk page, so for early/playful/experimental lets use drafting pages, and reserve this page for more concrete edit discussions. I have re-purposed the same drafting page I originally made for this article.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 16:01, 30 March 2020 (UTC)

Only keeping modern definitions is a dangerous thing to do for a page, because we cannot assume they are not still in flux (comparison: the conceptualization of "Slavic peoples" right now is very much in flux and inseparable from modern day geopolitics) and this is thus a recipe for POV warring. Overall, this is where I am somewhat torn. On the one hand, this page is essentially "Historiography of Germanic peoples" itself -- as, imo, it should be, and I think there is broad agreement on that. But at the same time, when we get into the weeds about the Toronto school, the Vienna school (is the Frankfurt school next???) then it is starting to get "too deep". There must be some way of partitioning the topic so that valuable material relating to those trends can be represented somewhere without cluttering this page. Many people who are interested in this topic will have their eyes glaze over once we start going into that. Perhaps the best thing to do is actually to add material on how different trends viewed Germanicness to those pages and have a few sentences with links to sections on those pages here? --Calthinus (talk) 16:59, 30 March 2020 (UTC)

I'm not totally convinced. It would be like providing an entire section to the Hyperborean hypothesis in Proto-Indo-European homeland (or even to the fringe 'Out of India' theory if we don't hierarchize theories), or to the Luminiferous aether in Universe. Any modern theory on any subject could be modified by a new breakthrough discovery. But even when a debate is occurring among scholars, there are always two or three competing leading theories. In the case of Germanic studies, the two main schools are Toronto and Vienna. Azerty82 (talk) 18:03, 30 March 2020 (UTC)

@Calthinus Sounds about right. I am also torn, but we have to try ideas. I think one thing you are saying is that we are not sure how successful the last restructuring (blame Andrew) has been in creating a stable version which will keep most people happy. Personally I like the idea, and maybe you agree, of this article being the homebase for the Germanenbegriff, and the historiography, with child articles under it, and no higher level theory articles. If not, then so be it, but then what is this article for? In theory it could become just a holding pen for lots of links and summaries: upwards to articles about the historiography or definition AND downwards to aspects like culture, law etc.

Do we need so many levels? My feeling as a WP watcher is that too many overlapping articles tires our editors, and readers, and watchers, and leads to bad articles, and murkiness where POV sharks live.

OTOH, if you see really nice areas on WP these are often ones where they can find nice short article topics, without too much overlap. That's what we all want to be. So TRYING to draft a definition or historiography article is worth thinking about at least. If it fails here then we need to put extra effort into thinking about child articles?

@Azerty82 I tend to agree that there are two main schools pushing things forward, but here on WP we have seen a strong attempt to keep mentioning an "Oxford" school. There is certainly an Oxford school mentioned in our various secondary sources, but I do not think it defines any particular unified position on something like the definition of what Germanic peoples mean. For those who see Heather as their leader, I just then see a slightly cautious and conservative approach. (But what about Ian Woods etc.) But actually Heather and Ward-Perkins respect the theoretical debate and mainly stay out of it. They are "professionally worried" about how many people were in the migrations, because that is what those two writers are into (Halsall seems to think this is a Brexit thing) but that is a debate this article only needs to mention in passing. So my take is that the third "school" for balance can be seen as "conservative" writers. Of course we then have Liebeschuetz. --Andrew Lancaster (talk) 18:26, 30 March 2020 (UTC)

If we agree on keeping only mainstream and modern theories in the /definition/ section, I would find it acceptable that we add the 'Oxford' School as the third leading 'theory'. Azerty82 (talk) 19:17, 30 March 2020 (UTC)

Anyway, I'm going to redact the section on linguistics as I promised. I'm working 8am–8pm despite (or rather because of) the covid epidemic. I don't have as much time as I'd like to provide comprehensive contributions (hence my recurrent typos in the discussion/history of edits) as I've done before. Stay tuned, Azerty82 (talk) 19:33, 30 March 2020 (UTC)

No rush.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 21:11, 30 March 2020 (UTC)

After reading, writing and thinking about it I realize why there is no section about competing definitions from different schools: My current understanding: Although there are schools with different opinions about nearly everything to do with Germanic peoples, different ways of defining "Germanic peoples" is not one of them. The linguistic and archaeological definitions are for example not really debated to be more correct than any other definition: they are still trying to help describe the same peoples? (The advocates of avoiding the term altogether are of course associated with a school, and are mentioned. But even they are not debating about definitions as such.) For example I find no "linguistic school" who is arguing that anyone who did not speak Germanic must never be called Germanic. Am I wrong everyone? Possibly there are debates I don't know about. --Andrew Lancaster (talk) 08:32, 31 March 2020 (UTC)

On another point discussed above, I have "boldly" edited the introduction of the Definition section, with an idea of trying to make sure the section starts with something more like a stand-alone definition. This is partly just good practice, and partly because it might help experimentally imagine the rest of the section in other terms such as "historiography" or "debates" (not that we have to make any such changes).--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 11:56, 31 March 2020 (UTC)

I agree—there is no debate concerning a definition of "Germanic people(s)". In fact, there is little discussion of a definition at all. People seem content to leave them undefined or leave their working definitions implicit. Presumably because unless you are dealing only with, say, Tacitus and his Germani any definition will be one you made up and can be rejected with a wave of the hand by other scholars. That is, there is no clear conventional definition of who or what a Germanic people is at any point in time. I do think that there is an implicit linguistic definition at work, because that is one thing that is objective and does not depend on contemporaries noticing it. So any discussion of whether, e.g., the Scirii who attacked Olbia and reappeared in Late Antiquity were Germanic is a discussion about what language they spoke. Srnec (talk) 13:08, 31 March 2020 (UTC)

The approach I continue to take, which is similar to the more analytical works in German, like Pohl's Germanen, is to point to the several "dimensions" of the way definitions-in-practice have worked since Caesar. Language was always part of that.

Calthinus and Azerty raised the question of whether we could ever split out debates or historical theories, from a main definition. In terms of debates about definitions though, there is one big one, with several aspects: the 19th century reconstruction of a bigger Germanic language family meant the term could be applied to more peoples and periods; the expanded use that the "Germanic terminology" then had, to some extent replacing "Northern barbarians", is seen as creating a potential bias in historical narratives. (I do not see this as a purely Toronto thing at all. The way I read Heather and Liebeschuetz they actually agree that this terminology gives a potential bias towards certain narratives, but don't mind, because they see those are the narratives they agree with. But their readers won't necessarily know that. The way I saw one author explain it: the most important thing is to know about the bias any specific terminology gives. Indeed, this is an issue on many topics.)--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 14:07, 31 March 2020 (UTC)

Forget the definition section. I am going to work in a draft and eventually provide a comprehensive summary based upon modern scholarly studies in a few weeks. It is better than losing time in endless discussions. Let us first renamed this article Ancient Germanic peoples to avoid any possible confusion. See you soon, Azerty82 (talk) 17:21, 31 March 2020 (UTC)

Nope. Now I am interested in this idea :) But anyway, the changes I made today need to sink in. I look forward to whatever you come up with. --Andrew Lancaster (talk) 19:04, 31 March 2020 (UTC)

Oops. Did not see the second sentence. I think we'd need an RFC on such a name change but I would probably vote against it, how I see it now. In the past we had some discussions, and the dialogue goes something like this:

• Let's split into modern and ancient Germanic peoples
• Are there modern Germanic peoples?
• For modern peoples we use a linguistic definition.
• So it is purely linguistic and has nothing to do with being successors of the Germani? So it will mean Jamaicans and Ashkanezi are Germanic people? Do you have any source which use such terminology for modern peoples?
• Of course Jamaicans are not Germanic. Your dangerous dehumanizing racist rhetoric can lead to genocide. There are plenty of Visigoths living, breathing, and walking around today.

Please note that using sarcasm on Wikipedia is not recommended (unfortunately). I recommend the archives of this talk page.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 19:21, 31 March 2020 (UTC)

Worth remarking: (1) of course for "non ancient" and purely linguistic Germanic topics, there are many other articles (2) for purely linguistic discussion of the Germanic language family (including ancient), proto language etc, there are also linguistic articles (3) for anything which describes real historical Germanic peoples before late antiquity, even if it uses a "linguistic definition" of Germanic peoples, linguistic sources are not enough, and I do not think we can speak of a separate "linguistic" vision of the history of these real peoples known from classical history.

This is simply logical, because there is almost no linguistic evidence except for weak evidence that can be interpreted various ways: a few runes, god names, personal names, river names etc. (River names are often seen as one of the most important.) The linguistics text books have to defer to historians, archaeologists, philologists etc. Linguists contributing to the field effectively act as historians etc, when they actually start talking about real peoples and regions in this period before linguistic evidence. Textbooks and tertiary sources normally summarize simpler older ideas rather than attempting to give a summary of any ideas which changed even in the late twentieth century.

Am I wrong?--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 08:44, 1 April 2020 (UTC)

archaeology section(s) and pre-Caesar (pre) history sections

Eventually we need to look again at the several archaeology sections we have. Perhaps they need to merged. I hope that my recent work on the introduction to the Definition section, making it more able to stand on its own, can help us imagine more options. These are:

• "Archaeological evidence" [7] in the large Definitions section [8]. I think it can be moved out of the Definitions section.
• The urheimat paragraph in the language section. [9]
• The final paragraph in the Prehistory section [10]

Azerty82 maybe this fits well (or not well) with your ideas?

• Idea=> One approach might be to start by splitting out an archaeology section from the language section, and merging the other two into that?
• Idea=> These considerations also focus attention on the rest of the prehistory section which is arguably not prehistory at all. The rest is a quote from Caesar, but it needs to be explained together with modern archaeological evidence. So I would propose moving it all into a merged archaeology section. I would say that linguistics and archaeology are the real prehistory discussion, and our history section needs no separate prehistory section?--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 07:52, 1 April 2020 (UTC)

Azerty, now I tried such a re-structuring. I think it helps address points raised by both you and Calthinus, and hopefully gives a better base for various possible ways of working further. There is now a prehistory section which can now be worked on more directly.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 10:19, 1 April 2020 (UTC)

Yes, this is a welcomed improvement, thank you. I'm working on my draft for now; you can follow the progress here. Azerty82 (talk) 10:46, 1 April 2020 (UTC)

Good to hear. BTW thinking about the difference now between the Definitions and Debates sections now, I do not claim to have perfectly followed the ideas of either you or Calthinus, but done something I think is simpler. I will start watching your draft. I had checked in before and noticed that until now it is mainly just some short notes from an Indo-European handbook. The language of the Cimbri and Teutones is not a simple consensus anymore though and I think we are already mention it. The idea of including discussion about runic evidence is interesting, but a lot of it is also not necessarily as straightforward as a handbook might report? Another type of evidence we are not mentioning is river names and the like. There will be a question how much detail to give here of course, in contrast to other articles like Proto-Germanic, Germanic parent language and Negau helmet. (We currently have no urheimat article for Germanic I think.)--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 11:42, 1 April 2020 (UTC)

Yes, my draft is only based upon one source for the moment. I try to use the dialectical method in my contributions, as I'm doing on my draft on the Origin of Albanians: I first redact a general introduction based upon handbooks (they're built to give general statements beyond scholarly debates), then I "adjust" every statement with the help of contradicting/nuancing sources in order to reach a "balanced" presentation at the end of my work. Azerty82 (talk) 12:51, 1 April 2020 (UTC)

OK, so apart from my remarks here so far (also in the section above) I don't see any point making details comments on that draft yet, but I look forward to seeing it evolve. If we have detailed remarks that are specifically about the draft, not bigger editorial decisions, then I suppose we can use the draft talk-page.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 12:54, 1 April 2020 (UTC)

Note that my draft, from now limited to the /languages/ section, consequently uses the term Germanic speakers. I am very careful with words, as linguistic evidence gives us information about a language and its speakers, not necessarily about a people. Azerty82 (talk) 21:26, 1 April 2020 (UTC)

That does not seem to make any difference concerning anything in the draft yet? Again being devil's advocate, you have added a second Indo-European textbook source, but of course these sources will not create any dialectical dynamic, because they are apparently just deferring to older research from non-linguists. They do not seem to be reflecting any of the newer scientific skepticism which is now more than 40 years old, and not exactly cutting edge. The languages of the four named tribes has been seriously questioned for a very long time, for the simple reason that there is no significant linguistic evidence. (The Cimbri and Teutones, can be linguistically described as having names which CAN NOT BE Germanic though, but also this is an old conclusion.) First sound shift before 500 BCE is not a simple consensus as far as I know. Concerning personal names: Attila and his family, for example, had Gothic names, and Gothic clearly became a sort of standard language in that empire and in the Roman military. There is therefore long-standing skepticism about whether signs of Gothic culture such as Gothic personal names prove anything about what languages peoples spoke before Attila's empire. I also understand there is insufficient linguistic evidence to help us debate something as refined as whether there was a dialect continuum as early as 200 AD, etc. To have a proper discussion about the points raised in the draft so far might require a long technical article? I also suppose that linguistic speculations which have created no consensus due to lack of evidence are things we should be cautious about spending too much text on in this specific article. The real-world problem is still that linguistic textbooks are mainly deferring to other fields, because they have to. It is probably too early for me to be making too many comments, but at least these remarks help define the challenge. Of course we should search for any extra contribution linguistics can make. However, linguistic textbook repetitions of things not based on linguistic evidence, only based on what people from other disciplines said a long time ago, won't normally have much value for this article? Sorry for raising challenges like this, but I hope you will take it the right way!--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 22:23, 1 April 2020 (UTC)

Nowhere it is written in my draft that the Cimbri and Teutones spoke a Germanic language. They have a Germanic tribal name. The linguistic continuum until 200 AD is evidenced by runic inscriptions (I don't understand why you're dismissing that as "mere speculations"): e.g. Primitive Norse raunijaz (pronounced rauniiaz; Øvre Stabu spearhead; 2nd c. AD), Gothic ranja (pronounced raniia; Spearhead of Dahmsdorf-Müncheberg; 3rd c. AD); Primitive Norse harja (prunounced haria Vimose inscriptions; 2nc c. AD), Gothic harjis (hariis; Codex Argenteus); etc. My sources are recent and reliable anyway. If there is a consensus within a scientific field, I think it should be mentioned in the article. Azerty82 (talk) 22:41, 1 April 2020 (UTC)

By the way, a dialect continuum does not imply that Gothic speakers and Primitive Norse speakers were fully able to understand each others. A dialect continuum is... a dialect continuum. Azerty82 (talk) 22:58, 1 April 2020 (UTC)

My final word: sorry Andrew Lancaster, but I will not go into endless discussions again: (1) based on your previous comments on the “Second Consonant Shift” and the “lack of evidence for a dialect continuum”, it is clear that your knowledge of historical linguistics is limited; (2) if I want to introduce recent and reliable sources in the article, especially consensual statements within a scientific field, there is nothing you can do against it as per Wikipedia rules. Azerty82 (talk) 23:09, 1 April 2020 (UTC)

@C: Your recommended draft and changes make perfect sense to me and has my support as a fellow Wikipedia editor, speaker of Germanic languages, and historian. Each and every change does not require this level of disputation. Collaboration is not about one person being the sole arbiter of content and I am glad you bring these points to the fore. Your expertise in this domain (linguistics, archaeology, and history) is recognized based on the contributions you've made over many years, and the professional-level translations you've provided; if there are any places where there is substantiated academic contestation to any of the points you make, I am sure you'd welcome their inclusion. Do not however, refrain from making them.--Obenritter (talk) 00:23, 2 April 2020 (UTC)

Quite evidently, the idea of dismissing an entire scientific field of research by saying that "linguistic textbooks [repeat] things not based on linguistic evidence", as above written, never came to my mind. Prof.Dr. Goffart, like any other reliable source, will be included in my draft. I have no agenda. My only aim is, modestly, to reach the historical truth, not to confirm my preconceived ideas. Azerty82 (talk) 01:01, 2 April 2020 (UTC)

I second Obenritter. I read Azerty82's draft and I think it's excellent work and well-constructed. The suggestions made by both these editors here are sensible. Carlstak (talk) 03:17, 2 April 2020 (UTC)

Misunderstandings. I appreciate all the concerns etc, but please note everyone that I was commenting on a drafting process, and so my comments have to be seen in the light of a specific version of a draft. I see my edits as supportive of both the drafting, and, obviously, the idea of trying to see what can be added to this article from linguistics. Clearly feedback on drafts is often wordy. Sorry. Perhaps I should have posted on the draft talk. I presented my remarks as being admittedly too early, but defining some challenges to keep in mind. It is simply a fact that linguistic evidence from the early period is fragmentary. But that challenge is not a simplistic questioning of linguistics, but also related to questions about this article: e.g. of avoiding duplications, and of what can fit in this article. I will just respond on two points as examples:

• No one is arguing against the relevance of Runic evidence. But much of it has multiple possible interpretations, and might require long discussion. For example the draft emphasizes (or emphasized) an early dating of the Negau helmet.
• The Cimbri and Teutones had non-Germanic recorded names. The names given in the draft are modern reconstructions based upon the assumption that the names which were recorded were wrong, because "everyone knows" they were Germanic. In other words these reconstructions are based on non linguistic evidence. Also, by the way, this is already discussed in the article (and added by me, so it is strange to see it being implied that I am somehow arguing against inclusion of such information).

I think as a bit of general advice it is worth looking more at what is already in the article. I know I keep harping on about duplication and structure, but I think we have to keep those things in mind on an article like this, during a period of heavy work like this. --Andrew Lancaster (talk) 07:44, 2 April 2020 (UTC)

Azerty82 I might as well address the remarks about 2 points were I apparently gave an impression of excessive ignorance. Surely I am ignorant, but also there might be misunderstandings about these points:

• I think that evidence of a dialect continuum is a much more specific thing than just evidence of a language having developed marked dialects. From what I am reading, perhaps you mean only the latter when you refer to the implications of runic evidence. There would need a lot of runic evidence to be that specific? From what I have seen runic evidence is used for example to discuss early distinctions between North, East and West Germanic. I am guessing you did not understand I was focusing on the word "continuum", not dialects as such.
• You recently reworked the Languages sections, and you apparently found no problem with the way Maurer's Istvaeonic (/Rhine Weser) is discussed there. I wrote that, and there is a source given. (It is surely not the only source which questions the evidence for this particular substrate.) In our previous discussion, we both saw it as a side issue (after all, this is not a specialist linguistics article) and so I think I mentioned at the time that I would not bother looking up sources etc.

If I am making mistakes above then please let me know more, on my talk page if necessary, not only for my interest, but also so that I can avoid making Wikipedia worse.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 08:20, 2 April 2020 (UTC)

Andrew Lancaster, my previous remark was a direct reply to the argument that modern linguists don't know what they're talking about. I'm happy to see that you didn't take it as a personal attack, but rather as a surprise to read such a statement as "linguistic textbooks [repeat] things not based on linguistic evidence".

As you noted here, the draft is still a work in progress and, as you saw it on the dedicated talk page, most of the remarks come from misunderstandings rather than concrete oppositions. I'm consequently adjusting the draft to make it clearer for the readers who don't have direct access to the sources I'm using.

You can also notice that most modern linguists are indeed as prudent and sceptical as modern historians: they are not taking contemporary testimonies as the "holy scriptures" on Germanic peoples and languages (cf: the subsection /Classification/).

Concerning your specific remarks, I prefer addressing them directly in the draft rather than making this talk page longer and more difficult to follow than it is already. Just notice that "Elbe Germanic" has always been written with quotation marks in the draft; I will again make the wording clearer to avoid such misunderstandings in the future. Azerty82 (talk)

Ah, that was a misunderstanding. My comment about linguists using results from other disciplines is specific to certain types of conclusions. See the example I noted of whether the names of the Cimbri and Teutones must have been mistaken. It is also a point about avoiding duplication or similar strangeness. I have absolutely no stronger/warmer feelings about historians versus linguists but I do notice that in many such "human sciences" in recent decades, there is a general increase in methodological scepticism, i.e. being more "scientific". This means narratives which were traditionally presented as if absolutely certain, let's say that the Scirii spoke a Germanic language, are now at least a bit doubted, and so we have to be careful about when we use "Wikipedia voice" or otherwise imply a field consensus.

I am now genuinely interested to know whether my two "ignorances" were misunderstandings or not.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 09:35, 2 April 2020 (UTC)

Concerning your two points, I'm now thinking that you're probably not the only reader to raise doubts or questions. So I'm going to provide justifications directly in the draft. I just have to reopen my copies of the books involved, as it is not explained in details in handbooks. It will be done by this evening (European time) if I have enough time today. Stay tuned, Azerty82 (talk) 12:45, 2 April 2020 (UTC)

PS: If you don't want to wait until this evening:

1. For the dialect continuum: Elmar Seebold (1998). "Sprache und Schrift" In: Germanen, Germania, Germanische Altertumskunde. (p. 95f in my edition)

2. On the Elbe Germanic debate:

To be clear, because of the remote contacts induced by migrations, the generally accepted Germanic linguistic groupings are, chronologically: 1. East Germanic vs. Northwest Germanic 2. East Germ. vs. Anglo-Frisian vs. residual Northwest Ger. 3. East Germ. vs. Anglo-Frisian vs. North Germ. vs. Continental Germ. Internal divisions within the latter group are debated among linguists. Azerty82 (talk) 13:30, 2 April 2020 (UTC)

• Volker Harm is cited in the article already on this point, and I am familiar with that article. Insgesamt ist das Fazit zu ziehen, dass die Untergliederung des Voralthochdeutschen in Elbgermanisch und Weser-Rhein-Germanisch wenig plausibel ist. That was more-or-less the same as what I said?
• Thanks for the Seebold reference. I have looked at it passingly before. I see that he uses the term "Kontinuum" to refer to the "natural" condition which all the prehistoric languages he discusses always had, though the exact nature of the continuum was changing over time. So if you are following this author, basically your use of the word only means to imply that Germanic was a normal language? (And not anything based on specific linguistic evidence, saying something specific about that specific continuum?) I'd avoiding the word if that is all you mean, because readers (like me) might believe it is saying implying more? You could just say "dialects" to give the same understanding to readers that languages don't need to (and probably normally) stem from one single small homogeneous language. Do I understand correctly? BTW, concerning several key details, Seebold is basing some of his geographical proposals on archaeology, by equating material cultures to languages, rather than linguistic evidence as such.
• This discussion reminds me of a work I have not been able to track down. I wonder if anyone else has access to Hermann Ament's, Der Rhein und die Ethnogenese der Germanen.
• The Aesti, also mentioned in that part of the draft, are also discussed in the current article. My understanding is that Tacitus did not insist they were Suebian, just that they had similar customs and attire.

In any case, you don't want to say it, but I am optimistically thinking based on this information, that my ignorance is only moderate, and not "red alert". :) --Andrew Lancaster (talk) 14:22, 2 April 2020 (UTC)

I only noticed afterwards that Harm was already in the article. I had removed the reference as you were already familiar with the chapter.

Yes, the theoretical basis of historical linguistics is the Uniformitarian principle:

Unless we can demonstrate significant changes in the conditions of language acquisition and use between some time in the unobservable past and the present, we must assume that the same types and distributions of structures, variation, changes, etc. existed at that time in the past as in the present.

cf: Donald Ringe > https://www.ling.upenn.edu/~beatrice/110/pdf/ringe/uniformitarian-principle.html. Read also https://www.glossa-journal.org/articles/10.5334/gjgl.888/ for a global overview.

Indeed, the dialect continuum is mainly based on the state of Germanic languages as attested after the 5/6 centuries CE and the Uniformitarian principle, both reinforced by early runic evidence from the 2/3rd centuries CE. Azerty82 (talk) 14:36, 2 April 2020 (UTC)

PS: For the Aestii, I only closely followed the wording of the source, but of course this needs to be nuanced with another secondary source (Therefore, scholars hesitate to believe that the dialect of the Aestii, who belonged to the Gmc subgroup Suebi (...)). Tacitus wrote (from the Loeb translation): Accordingly we must now turn to the right-hand shore of the Suebic Sea: here it washes the tribes of the Aestii; their customs and appearance are Suebic, but their language is nearer British (...). Azerty82 (talk) 14:46, 2 April 2020 (UTC)

Yep. The Latin and a link to the Perseus text is in a footnote in the article. "Aestiorum gentes [...], quibus ritus habitusque Sueborum", lingua Britannicae propior". FWIW Pohl, Die Germanen, translates them as having "Aussehen und religion wie die Sueben".--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 15:06, 2 April 2020 (UTC) Actually, in "Telling the Difference" he gives English "religion and appearance" (p.121, as cited in our article). He usefully states that Tacitus "did not reach a decision".--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 15:08, 2 April 2020 (UTC)

The part about Aestii is now better referenced. I'll add translations after comparing the different interpretations given by latinists and classical scholars. The section on early Germanic inscriptions has also been nuanced, as per Prof.Dr. Ludwig Rübekeil (a prudent linguist that you'll probably like). I'm going to further work on the draft this evening. Regards, Azerty82 (talk) 19:10, 2 April 2020 (UTC)

Yes, I know of Rübekeil. I can not see that specific article online unfortunately. Currently on the article I had the Aesti has probably Baltic. Does he say they might be Finnish/Finnic? --Andrew Lancaster (talk) 19:17, 2 April 2020 (UTC)

Therefore, scholars hesitate to believe that the dialect of the Aestii, who belonged to the Gmc subgroup Suebi and whose name lives on in modern Estonian, was similar to the Brythonic language (lingua Britannicae proprior), as Tacitus claims. Rather, it is considered to be a Finnish or Baltic dialect.

Go to my profile and use the option to send me an email. I will give you a pdf version of the handbook. Azerty82 (talk) 19:20, 2 April 2020 (UTC)

OK, and Merci.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 19:22, 2 April 2020 (UTC)

Genetic Legacy of Germanic Expansions Map

https://cache.eupedia.com/images/content/Germanic_Europe.gif

Worth including this image in the genetics section? While it may not be perfect (there are some issues I think for example over whether the R1b-L21 in the British Isles is actually genetically Celtic, since they don't seem to cluster with Celts on PCAs), Eupedia seems to be the most detailed breakdown of the genetic history of Europe that we have yet. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.170.40.71 (talk) 11:35, 6 April 2020 (UTC)

Nice graphic, but what is "Germanic Y DNA"? The difference between eupedia and wikipedia concerning original and non-obvious, un-published research is an obvious problem here. On Wikipedia we summarize what has been published in the best reputation sources. We are not allowed to be original. In expert publications there is no generally accepted definition of "Germanic Y DNA". On the internet there are all kinds of speculations. --Andrew Lancaster (talk) 18:27, 6 April 2020 (UTC)

Well, it's pretty simple. Germanic Y-DNA is Y-DNA believed to have belonged to those who lived in northern Germany and southern Scandinavia when the Proto-Germanic languages and culture developed and was carried by them (along with their languages) to other parts of Europe they settled when expanding outwards from there. How this is known is explained on Eupedia here: https://www.eupedia.com/genetics/britain_ireland_dna.shtml

I'm not particularly familiar with Eupedia which is why I posted this and asked. I don't know how reliable it is considered to be as a source because I don't know what methods Wikipedia editors use to include or exclude sources. And it honestly seems to be rather arbitrary and contradictory. For example when trying to list the English as a Germanic people you were provided with sources that are in use for Austrians, Dutch, Germans and other Germanic ethnic groups and you ignored them. I see you specifically on every single talk page related to Germanic peoples and English peoples fiercely, fiercely resisting the opinion that the English are a Germanic people, so you obviously have quite an emotional involvement in this for whatever reason. So why is Eupedia not a reliable source? And why are the sources in use for Austrians, Dutch, Germans etc. as Germanic ethnic groups not valid for the English people (because those same sources also include the English as Germanic in them)?

You've claimed before people in the British Isles weren't Germanic just because they spoke Germanic languages, right? I'm pretty sure I specifically seeing you fiercely defending attempts to list the English people as Germanic explicitly because the English had admixture with non-Germanic groups. Well how can you know those groups were non-Germanic? Isn't it rather presumptive and baseless of you to think that just because the people of the British Isles pre-Germanic settlement once spoke Celtic languages they were Celtic? If there's no Germanic Y-DNA, then there is no Celtic Y-DNA, right? So then classifying people as Germanic or Celtic comes solely down to language, since Germanic and Celtic are language families.

I don't know, man. You tell me. I really don't know what your problem is. We're all just trying to improve the Wikipedia and have objective realities included in articles, regardless of whether those objective realities offend the delicate sensibilities of certain people. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.170.40.71 (talk) 19:29, 6 April 2020 (UTC)

There's literally already a speculative haplogroup map in the genetics section of this page. All this map is is a further breakdown of those haplogroups into subclades. Because subclades are very important. And subclades paint a far more accurate picture of Europe's genetic story. R1b-U106 for example (which accounts for a significant amount of the R1b in England and Scotland) is very different to the R1b-L21 found in the British Isles. It comes from a different place, brought by different people, at a different time.

The current map in the genetics section paints a less accurate image as it groups all R1b, all R1a and many other large groups of haplomarkers into the one thing, when as I explained subclades matter, a LOT. There's a lot of R1b in western Africa for example, in really, really high percentages. But the people carrying R1b there are not remotely close genetically to the people carrying R1b in Enniskillen.

No eupedia is not a reliable source according to Wikipedia policy. Also the current article does not distinguish between Austrians, Dutch, Germans, and English people, or even discuss any of them very much. Nothing fierce about this. Wikipedia works in a certain way, using a policy of simply summarizing what publications with a confirmed reputation for fact checking and reliability say. Other websites work in different ways and encourage more originality, and that means that they can even invent their own ideas without needing to wait for geneticists or historians or whoever to publish something first. Do you edit on Wikipedia or not? Where is your information about Wikipedia coming from if not? Why have you never heard of the basic policy if you are an editor?--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 21:57, 6 April 2020 (UTC)

Andrew, the map of haplogroups currently used in the genetics section of this very page is sourced by Eupedia. There's dozens upon dozens of articles on Wikipedia that are currently sourcing Eupedia. Would you like me to list a dozen for you? Can you meanwhile direct me to where it states Eupedia is not a reliable source for Wikipedia. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.170.40.71 (talk) 22:19, 6 April 2020 (UTC)

Please do list them because that sourcing needs to be removed right away. See WP:RS.--Ermenrich (talk) 22:26, 6 April 2020 (UTC)

Eupedia is a website edited directly by users (like Wikipedia in some ways), correct? On Wikipedia we should not cite Wikipedia or anything like Wikipedia. In the case of Eupedia, it is self-published work, and there is no peer review system or reputable committees etc. It is not a website we see scholars citing, so we can't confirm it has a reputation among experts. That is a key point. Basically the reliable sources all tend to cite each other, or at least we have to hope they do. If a genius suddenly arises from nowhere and no experts know about it, WP has to wait a bit until someone publishes something about it. The core content policy to start at would be WP:RS, but there is a mass of more detailed community norms concerning RS, which are relevant to the case.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 22:36, 6 April 2020 (UTC)

Fair enough. I'll get started on that list.